;    SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 


HENRY  SLOANE  COFFIN 


L><viai«^a       >.J>  ^^ — 


Srctioo 


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SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 


SOCIAL  ASPECTS 
OF  THE    CROSS 

By 
HENRY  SLOANE  COFFIN     ""' 

Minister  in  the  Madison  Avenue  Presbyterian 
Church   and  Associate  Professor  of 
Homiletics  in  Union  Theolog- 
ical Seminary,  New 
York  City 


HODDER  &  STOUGHTON 

NEW  YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


Copyright,  1911, 
By  George  H.  Doran  Company 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.     Sin 3 

II.     Duty 27 

III.  Man 49 

IV.  God 67 


SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 


SIN 


I 

SIN 

Isaiah  53  :  12  :  "He  was  numbered  with  the  trans- 
gressors." 

Cf.  Luke  22:  37:"  For  I  say  unto  you,  that  this  which  is 
written  must  be  fulfilled  in  Me,  and  He  was  reckoned 
with  transgressors." 

JESUS  was  numbered  with  the  trans- 
gressors by  many  of  His  contem- 
poraries, and  they  were  by  no  means 
the  worst  men  among  the  inhabitants  of 
Palestine.  It  is  perhaps  impossible  for  us  at 
this  distance  to  assign  accurately  the  reasons 
which  impelled  them  to  enact  the  tragedy  of 
Calvary.  In  the  complicated  network  of  their 
motives  it  is  easy  to  distinguish  misunder- 
standing, prejudice,  bigotry,  ambition,  self- 
ishness, fear,  and  much  else  that  is  base; 
but  these  are  inextricably  tangled  with  honest 
convictions,  patriotism,  loyalty  to  time-hon- 
oured opinions,  devotion  to  revered  institu- 
tions. Had  we  met  the  scribes  of  Galilee  who 
began    the    agitation    against    Jesus,    or  the 

3 


4       SOCIAL   ASPECTS   OF   THE    CROSS 

members  of  the  Sanhedrin  who  condemned 
Him,  we  should  have  found  most  of  them 
courteous,  kindly,  upright,  loved  at  home, 
respected  by  their  friends,  pleasant  companions, 
with  much  in  them  to  admire  and  love.  Even 
Pilate  and  Judas  were  not  monsters.  But  the 
fact  remains  that  to  them  Jesus  of  Nazareth, 
for  one  reason  or  another,  seemed  an  undesir- 
able member  of  human  society  whom  they 
combined  to  execute  as  a  criminal. 

"All  we  like  sheep  have  gone  astray,"  says 
the  prophet,  speaking  of  the  strange  mistake 
that  numbered  the  sinless  Servant  with  trans- 
gressors. Sheep  seem  unreasoning  in  their 
movements  but  extremely  gregarious.  Landor 
once  made  the  significant  remark  that  "we 
admire  by  tradition  and  criticise  by  caprice." 
Caprice  —  that  is  sheep-like  unreason;  tradi- 
tion —  that  is  sheep-like  imitation.  The  death 
of  Jesus  startles  us  by  its  demonstration  that 
both  the  traditions  and  caprices  of  people  of 
average,  or  perhaps  more  than  average,  good- 
ness are  so  far  from  right.  It  makes  us  ques- 
tion the  labels  we  so  readily  attach  to  move- 
ments and  opinions  and  persons.  There  is 
nothing  unique  in  the  attitude  of  a  ^aiaphaa 


SIN  5 

or  a  Herod,  of  the  rulers  of  the  synagogues  of 
Galilee  who  sent  word  up  to  Jerusalem  of  the 
suspected  Innovator,  or  of  the  politician  who 
was  Roman  procurator  of  Judaea.  We  know 
dozens  of  men  and  women  who  share  substan- 
tially their  point  of  view.  We  seem  to  see  the 
face  of  a  rigorous  Pharisee  or  a  lax  Sadducee 
or  a  false  Judas  staring  out  at  us  from  our  own 
thoughts  and  impulses.  The  world  about  us* 
and  within  us  is  made  up  of  exactly  the  same 
sort  of  people  as  composed  the  world  of  Jesus' 
day,  and  He  was  numbered  with  the  trans- 
gressors. How  cautiously  must  we  form  our 
judgments,  how  searchingly  try  our  motives, 
how  hesitantly  pass  condemnations,  how 
sternly  check  our  whims  and  prejudices,  how 
resolutely  refuse  to  take  traditional  views 
merely  because  of  their  antiquity,  or  current 
opinions  because  of  their  universality !  We  live 
in  a  world  where  it  is  so  easy  to  be  tragically  in 
the  wrong,  to  mistake  love  for  something  else, 
to  nail  a  Son  of  God  to  a  cross,  while  we  know  - 
not  what  we  do. 

Again,  and  this  is  more  surprising,  Jesus 
numbered  Himself  with  the  transgressors. 
There  is  not  the  slightest  indication  that  He 


6       SOCLVL  ASPECTS   OF  THE   CROSS 

felt  Himself  a  sinner.  The  keenest  conscience 
our  world  has  known  found  nothing  with  which 
to  charge  itself.  There  is  no  expression  of 
penitence  and  no  plea  for  forgiveness  among 
the  personal  prayers  of  Jesus.  But  this  does 
not  mean  that  He  considered  Himself  without 
responsibility  for  the  ignorance  and  folly  and 
iniquity  of  the  world  in  which  He  lived.  While 
fully  aware  of  His  uniqueness,  placing  Himself 
apart  from  and  over  against  all  the  rest  of 
humanity,  Jesus  realized  His  oneness  with  men 
in  all  that  they  achieved  or  failed  of,  suffered 
or  enjoyed.  If  there  was  a  Zacchseus  whose 
honesty  and  generosity  had  given  way  under 
the  bad  system  of  revenue  collecting  then  in 
vogue,  Jesus  felt  Himself  implicated  in  his 
downfall.  If  there  were  sick  folk,  their  dis- 
eases were  to  Him,  in  part  at  last,  due  to  in- 
herited weaknesses  or  wrong  conditions  of 
life  which  might  frankly  be  termed  devilish, 
and  for  which  He  felt  Himself  socially  account- 
able. If  the  Church  of  His  day  was  unable 
to  reach  large  sections  of  the  population, 
if  it  succeeded  very  imperfectly  in  making 
children  of  the  Most  High  out  of  those 
whom  it  did  reach,  if  it  exaggerated  ridiculous 


SIN  7 

trifles  and  under-emphasized  such  essentials 
as  justice,  mercy,  and  faithfulness,  He, 
as  a  member  of  that  Church,  was  chargeable 
with  its  failures.  The  young  Mazzini  at 
sixteen  determined  to  dress  always  in  black, 
feeling  himself  in  mourning  for  his  country; 
and  Thomas  Arnold,  oppressed  by  the  lacl^l 
of  moral  principle  in  the  policies  of  the 
British  government  of  his  day,  writes  a 
friend  that  he  suffers  from  "A  daily  pain- 
fulness  —  a  moral  east  wind,  which  makes 
me  feel  uncomfortable  without  any  par- 
ticular ailment."  "Himself,"  comments  ourj 
first  evangelist,  "Himself  took  our  infirm- 
ities and  bare  our  diseases."  "For  them 
that  were  sick,  I  was  sick."  Sinless  Him- 
self, He  felt  socially  involved  in  the  in- 
iquities and  frailties  of  all  His  brethren. 
He  was  one  in  the  transgressing  family 
of   God. 

And  because  His  conscience  was  so  much 
more  sensitive  than  theirs,  and  because  He 
was  bound  to  them  by  a  sympathy  we 
cannot  hope  to  understand,  He  was  bur- 
dened by  their  transgressions  as  they 
were     not.        One    of    the    noblest    of    the 


8       SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

characters    in    the    Greek    drama,     Phaedra's 

nurse     in    Euripides's     "  Hippoly  tus, "     says: 

"Oh,  pain  were  better  than  tending  pain!  1 
For  that  were  single,  and  this  is  twain,  I 
With  grief  of  heart  and  labour  of  hmb. " 

There  was  not  only  a  doubleness,  there  was 
a  multipHcity,  in  the  life  of  Jesus.  He  could 
not  see  able-bodied  and  willing  workmen 
standing  idle  in  the  market  place  because  no 
man  had  hired  them,  without  sharing  their 
discouragement,  nor  prodigals  making  fools 
of  themselves  in  far  countries  without  think- 
ing of  their  heart-broken  fathers  and  feeling 
the  shame  the  careless  boys  should  themselves 
have  felt,  had  their  consciences  functioned 
normally. 

"And  he  who  lives  more  lives  than  one. 
More  deaths  than  one  must  die." 

When  the  dark  shadow  of  His  own  murder 
falls  upon  Him,  He  shrinks  from  it,  and  falters, 
and  seems  overwhelmed.  It  is  not  lack  of 
physical  courage  that  accounts  for  the  agony 
in  Gethsemane;  it  is  not  His  reluctance  to  part 
with  a  life  with  which  He  can  accomplish  so 
infinitely  much;  but  it  is  His  sympathy  with 
the    very    men    who    were    murdering    Him, 


SIN  9 

which  made  Him  feel  their  bhndness,  their 
perversity,  their  utter  disharmony  with  the 
God  they  professed  to  honour,  as  a  load  of 
guilt  that  rested  on  Him.  They  were  His 
brothers  for  whom  He  was  responsibje,  and 
what  they  did  was  a  household  disgrace  which 
involved  Him.  As  the  conscientious  member  of 
a  family  feels  the  shame  of  a  kinsman's  crime, 
while  the  culprit  himself  may  not  be  seriously 
disturbed,  so  Jesus  was  the  conscience  of  His 
less  conscientious  brothers,  and  felt  what  they 
should  have  felt.  "The  reproaches  of  them 
that  reproached  Thee,  fell  on  Me."  He  real- 
ized, as  they  did  not,  the  enormity  of  what 
they  were  doing.  He  was  aware,  as  they  were 
not,  of  the  pain  they  were  causing  God.  In 
the  curse  they  brought  on  themselves.  He  was 
accursed.  John  Woolman,  the  Quaker,  enters 
in  his  journal:  "I  felt  the  depth  and  extent 
of  the  misery  of  my  fellow-creatures  separated 
from  the  divine  harmony,  and  it  was  greater 
than  I  could  bear,  and  I  was  crushed  down 
under  it."  "He  began  to  be  greatly  amazed 
and  sore  troubled.  And  He  saith  to  His  disciples, 
*  My  soul  is  exceeding  sorrowful  even  unto 
death.'  "   The  prayers  He  utters  are  cries  from 


10      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

a  black  abyss.  **My  Father,  if  it  be  possible, 
let  this  cup  pass  away  from  Me."  He  num- 
bered Himself  with  the  transgressors;  and  no 
one  ever  appreciated  how  heavy  was  the 
burden  of  their  transgression,  until  the  Son 
of  God  staggered  under  it  —  what  this  tangled 
network  of  mixed  motives  meant  to  a  sensi- 
tive conscience  implicated  in  it,  until  He 
recoiled  from  its  deathly  contact. 

And,  far  more  astounding  still,  Jesus  was 
numbered  by  God  with  the  transgressors.  "It 
pleased  the  Lord  to  bruise  Him;  He  hath  put 
Him  to  grief."  This  is  not  to  say  that  the 
Most  High  by  some  juggling  of  terms  called 
a  sinless  man  a  sinner,  nor  that  by  some  device 
of  celestial  book-keeping  He  transferred  our 
debit  column  to  Jesus  and  His  credit  colunm 
to  us.  But  back  of  the  sense  of  solidarity  which 
made  Jesus  consider  Himself  answerable  for 
every  wrong  done  by  His  brethren,  and  behind 
the  sympathy  which  made  Him  feel  their  guilt 
weighing  on  His  heart,  was  the  Father  prompt- 
ing, sending,  inspiring  Him.  "  God  made  Him," 
says  Paul  in  one  of  those  bold  sentences  that 
can  easily  sound  repulsive  unless  we  stop  to 
understand  them,    "God    made    Him    to    be 


SIN  11 

sin  for  us,  who  knew  no  sin."  God  did  not 
make  Jesus  a  sinner,  but  that  love  which  led 
Jesus  to  feel  socially  accountable  for  every 
injustice  and  oppression  and  falsity  among  the 
sons  of  men  and  to  take  to  Himself  what  they 
should  have  felt  and  could  not  for  their  dulness 
of  conscience,  that  was  the  divine,  was  God  in 
Jesus,  for  that  love  is  what  God  is.  "  Christ  by 
an  eternal  spirit  offered  Himself."  In  His 
pouring  out  His  soul  unto  death.  He  is  not 
displaying  some  new  spirit,  but  the  eternal 
Spirit  who  is  behind  and  in  all  history.  The 
Father,  abiding  in  Him,  felt  this  responsibility 
and  was  burdened  with  this  guilt.  Jesus  and 
the  Father  were  one  in  this.  God  feels  impli- 
cated in  every  wrong  in  the  family  life  of  His 
children  and  shamed  by  the  guilt  we  ought  to 
feel,  and  usually  do  not,  for  our  wrong  doing. 
**God  commendeth  His  own  love  toward  us,  in 
that,  while  we  were  yet  sinners,  Christ  died  for 
us. "  In  all  that  Jesus  felt  and  endured  we  touch 
God,  or  rather  God  Himself  touches  us.  In  a  true 
sense  the  holy  God  numbers  Himself  with  the 
transgressors,  feels  accountable  as  our  Father  for 
what  we  do,  and  shamed  as  our  Father  in  the  dis- 
grace we  bring  on  Him  as  well  as  on  ourselves. 


12      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

But  this  is  not  all.  There  came  a  point  in 
the  sufferings  of  Jesus  when  He  did  not  feel 
Himself  at  one  with  God.  He  numbered 
Himself  with  the  transgressors  over  against 
the  righteous  Father.  "My  God,  My  God, 
why  hast  Thou  forsaken  Me.^"  It  is  common 
to  explain  the  cry  by  saying  that  Jesus  thought 
Himself  in  His  extreme  weakness  and  appar- 
ent defeat  abandoned  by  God,  while  in  reality 
the  Father  was  never  nearer.  But  surely  we 
must  hesitate  to  call  Jesus  mistaken,  and 
mistaken  in  that  touch  with  God  where  above 
all  He  excels  us.  Older  theologians  used  to  say 
that  Jesus  tasted  the  wrath  of  God.  We 
shrink  from  their  language,  but  were  they  so 
far  wrong?  Wrath  is  our  name  for  love's 
instinct  of  self-preservation.  If  God  be  love, 
He  must  hate  every  thing  that  hampers  and 
hinders  His  children  from  entering  that  fulness 
of  life  with  one  another  and  with  Him  which 
He  purposes  for  us.  "Your  goodness,'*  writes 
Emerson,  "must  have  some  edge  to  it  —  else 
it  is  none.  The  doctrine  of  hatred  must  be 
preached,  as  the  counteraction  of  the  doctrine 
of  love,  when  that  pules  and  whines."  The 
love  which  is  a  purifying  flame  kindling  us 


SIN  13 

to  godlikeness  cannot  but  be  a  consuming 
fire  destroying  every  ungodlike  element.  There 
is  a  "fierceness  which  from  tenderness  is  never 
far. "  One  night  after  talking  privately  with  a 
number  of  medical  students  who  had  unbosomed 
their  own  sins  to  him  and  spoken  of  others' 
iniquities,  Henry  Drummond  was  found  by  a 
friend  leaning  against  a  mantel,  pale  and  tired, 
and  when  asked  if  he  were  sick,  replied:  "Oh, 
I  am  sick;  sick  with  the  sins  of  these  men! 
How  can  God  bear  it?'*  How  can  God  bear 
His  children's  sins?  In  one  sense  He  does 
bear  them  with  a  patience  and  a  sympathy 
past  understanding.  But  His  bearing  is  no 
easy  tolerance  of  the  intolerable.  His  love 
for  us  is  hot  with  wrath  for  them.  In  that 
un wrathful  recoil  of  love  is  our  hope  that  He  wil]^ 
not  cease  until  all  that  is  ungodlike  in  our  owr 
and  the  world's  life  is  abolished.  The  sinlessL 
Sufferer  on  the  cross,  in  His  oneness  with  His 
brethren,  felt  their  wrong  doing  His  own,  con- 
fessed in  His  forsakenness  that  God  would  have 
nothing  to  do  with  it  save  destroy  it,  felt  that 
it  separated  between  men  and  God,  and  that 
He  was  so  at  one  with  us  that  He  was  actually 
away  from  God.   "That  was  hell,  "said  a  Scotch 


14      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 
theologian,  "and  He  tasted  it."     By  no  fic- 
titious process,  but  by  the  inevitable  sequence 
that  resulted  from  Jesus'  social  conscience  and, 
sympathetic    heart,  "the    Lord    laid  on  Him 
the  iniquity  of  us  all.     He  was  numbered  with 
the   transgressors,    and    He   bare    the    sin    of 
many."     There  is  a  horror  of  deep  darkness 
here.     We  may  be  sure  that  the  forsaking  cost 
the  Father  as  much  pain  as  it  cost  Jesus;  but 
it  had  to  be.     "The  mystery  of  the  cross,^ 
writes  a  woman  of  rare  insight,  "did  not,  it 
is  true,  explain  any  one  of  the  enigmas  con- 
nected with  our  mortal  existence  and  destiny, 
but  it  linked  itself  in  my  spirit  with  them  all. 
It  was  itself  an  enigma  flung  down  by  God 
alongside  the  sorrowful  problem  of  human  life, 
the  confession  of  Omnipotence  itself  to  some 
stern    reality    of    misery    and    wrong."     "He 
was  numbered  with  the  transgressors."  Jl 

"Follow  Me,"  said  Jesus  to  His  disciples; 
and  lest  there  should  be  any  doubt  how  far 
they  were  to  accompany  Him,  He  specified: 
"If  any  man  will  come  after  Me,  let  him  take 
up  his  cross  and  follow  Me."     The  cross  wa.^ 

Hi  ?/'\w  ^^rd  rnnnrrt^d  ^"ly  with  the  wnr^h 
QriminflilSt     How  can  the  servants  be,  as  their 


SIN  15 

Lord,  "numbered  with  the  transgressors?" 
*'Woe  unto  you  when  all  men  shall  speak 
well  of  you!"  Until  the  Kingdom  of  God  has 
come,  and  all  life  is  conformed  to  the  divine 
will  there  must  be  an  eccentricity  in  the  chil- 
dren of  light.  We  are  doomed  to  be  non- 
conformists. This  is  not  to  put  a  premium 
on  peculiarities  and  measure  a  man's  goodness 
by  its  oddity.  It  is  to  insist  that  we  can  take 
nothing  for  granted  in  the  standards  and 
principles  and  usages  we  discover.  We  must 
think  for  ourselves,  and  think  with  the  mind  of 
Christ.  Our  eccentricity  will  follow  as  a 
matter  of  course.  To  go  with  the  crowd  is 
like  sheep  to  go  astray.  To  follow  our  own 
inclinations  is  like  sheep  to  turn  every  one 
to  his  own  way.  There  is  nothing  for  us  as 
Christians,  but  a  constant,  thoughtful,  de- 
liberate loyalty  to  Jesus.  There  is  but  one  type 
of  disciple  —  that  well  pictured  in  Milton's 
Archangel  Michael: 

"For  this  was  all  thy  care 
To  stand  approv'd  in  sight  of  God,  tho*  worlds 
Judged  thee  perverse." 

Here  is    an    angel  numbered  with    the  trans- 
gressors. 


16      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 
critirism   and   pnHnrP  K^m^  rr^i,^iip() erst noH   ^^. 

flftfr  all,  hnt  a  small  part  of  thft  fftUowohip  q£ 
(;;hrist\g!  s]^fy^rin^s,  There  is  a  sharing  of  His 
social  conscience.  If  a  life  is  being  extinguished 
by  a  preventable  disease,  or  by  an  accident 
due  to  heartless  want  of  forethought,  there  is 
a  trail  of  blood  traceable  to  our  door  as  really 
as  though  we  had  committed  murder.  If 
there  is  a  prisoner  behind  bars  who  is  innocent 
of  his  crime,  or  one  whose  birth  amid  degrading 
conditions  foredoomed  him  to  excessive  temp- 
tation, or  one  whom  prison  life  is  turning  into 
tenfold  more  a  child  of  hell  than  when  he 
entered,  we  are  to  bl^ame  for  what  he  is.  If  our 
industries  overtask  fandj  under-reward  some; 
if  there  is  greed  and  chicanery;  if  there  is  want 
of  heart  in  the  world  of  business;  if  public  life 
is  not  just,  honourable,  pure;  if  there  is  cor- 
ruption in  government;  if  our  country  is  not 
displaying  a  Christ-like  spirit  in  its  international 
relations;  if  among  us  man  is  pitted  against 
man  in  racial  antipathy  and  class  hatred; 
if  the  Church  of  Christ  is  negligent;  if  there  is 
waste  through  sectarian  rivalry  and  failure 
through  want  of  co-operation;  if  there  are  lives 


SIN  17 

at  home  or  in  the  ends  of  the  earth  without 
the  inspiration  of  the  gospel  of  Christ,  because 
the  Church  lacks  the  means  or  the  will  to  serve 
them;  if  any  human  being  is  deprived  of  a 
just  share  in  the  race's  comfort,  pleasure, 
culture,  faith  —  we  are  accountable.  There  is 
no  needless  suffering  and  no  sin  in  all  the  world 
that  does  not  in  a  very  genuine  sense  come 
home  to  you  and  me  as  something  for  which 
we  are  personally  blameworthy.  We  "sin 
by  syndicate,"  by  the  industrial  order  which 
we  help  maintain,  by  the  government  which 
we  place  in  power,  by  the  Church  into  which 
we  throw  our  personalities,  by  the  whole 
corporation  of  humanity  which  is  one  vast 
multi-personality  of  which  we  are  integral 
parts.  "For  none  of  us  livpth  unto  himself, 
jy^d  none  HiptVi  to  liimsplf"  Wherever  there 
is  a  Zacchseus,  a  son  of  God  is  bound  to  say, 
"I  must";  for  Zacchseus's  plight  lays  an  ob- 
ligation on  him.  Wherever  there  is  a  woman 
bound  with  some  curable  malady,  followers  of 
Christ  say  with  Him,  "Ought  not  this  woman 
be  loosed?"  Wherever  there  is  a  wretched 
Magdalen  selling  her  womanhood  on  city 
streets,  her  shame  soils  every  clean  man  and 


18      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

woman  in  the  family  of  God.  "He  Himself," 
writes  Martin  Luther  to  a  correspondent, 
*'will  teach  thee  how  in  receiving  thee  He 
makes  thy  sins  His,  and  His  righteousness 
thine.  When  thou  believest  this  firmly,  then 
bear  patiently  with  erring  brothers,  making 
\their  sins  thine. " 

To  many  this  may  seem  far-fetched.  Their 
consciences  tax  them  with  their  own  wrong 
doing,  but  the  woe  and  injustice  and  sin  which 
they  are  not  aware  of  doing  any  thing  to  cause, 
never  give  them  a  twinge.  But  conscience, 
like  a  taste  for  music  or  the  appreciation  of 
poetry  or  the  sense  for  God,  is  a  developable 
instinct.  It  has  to  be  expanded  to  function 
at  long  range.  George  Fox  prayed  "to  be 
baptized  into  a  sense  of  all  conditions,  that  I 
might  be  able  to  know  the  needs  and  feel  the 
sorrows  of  all. "  This  is  not  a  gratuitous  prayer, 
a  superfluous  sympathy,  which  a  folio  er  of 
Christ  may  omit  if  he  will.  Until  all  the  wrong 
and  needless  pain  of  a  whole  world  is  felt  by 
us  as  something  for  which  we  are  responsible 
before  God,  responsible  in  our  degree  as 
He  is  responsible  for  it  in  His,  we  have  not 
had    formed    in    us    the    conscience    of    the 


SIN  19 

Son  of  man,  who  was  numbered  with  the 
transgressors. 

And,  further,  when  we  come  to  share  Christ's 
intense  love  for  men  we  shall  also  share  "the 
wrath  of  the  Lamb."  We  shall  become  good 
haters,  and  that  means  passionately  earnest 
fighters  and  toilers  for  righteousness,  ablaze 
with  indignation  at  wrong,  and  with  blood 
that  runs  as  liquid  flame  at  the  sight  of  in- 
iquity. A  God,  who  is  a  consuming  fire,  de- 
mands that  His  children  of  light  shall  be 
children  of  as  pure  and  purifying  heat. 

And,  still  further,  as,  like  Christ,  we  appre- 
ciate God's  iniquity-destroying  wrath  on  the 
one  hand  and  enter  on  the  other  into  men's 
lives  with  a  sympathy  that  makes  all  that  is 
theirs  ours,  we  shall  share  in  some  measure 
Christ's  burden  of  a  world's  guilt.  Paul 
speaks  of  his  sense  of  the  inseparable  love  of 
God  in  Christ,  that  holds  him,  and  at  once 
adds,  "I  say  the  truth  in  Christ,  I  lie  not, 
my  conscience  bearing  witness  with  me  in  the 
Holy  Spirit,  that  I  have  great  sorrow  and 
unceasing  pain  in  my  heart.  For  I  could 
wish  that  I  myself  were  anathema  from  Christ 
for  my  brethren's  sake,  my  kinsmen  accord- 


20      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

ing  to  the  flesh."  A  recent  man  of  letters, 
himself  a  degenerate,  but  with  a  conscience 
rendered  impressionable  by  his  own  conscious- 
ness of  wrong,  caught  in  "the  gin  that  waits 
for  sin,"  tells  how  in  jail  on  the  night  when 
a  murderer  was  to  be  executed  that  man's 
crime  weighed  on  his  fellow  prisoners: 

"He  lay  as  one  who  lies  and  dreams 

In  a  pleasant  meadow  land, 
The  watchers  watched  him  as  he  slept. 

And  could  not  understand 
How  one  could  sleep  so  sweet  a  sleep 

With  a  hangman  close  at  hand. 

"But  there  is  no  sleep  when  men  must  weep 

Who  never  yet  have  wept: 
So  we  —  the  fool,  th^  fraud,  the  knave  — 

That  endless  vigil  kept. 
And  through  each  brain  on  hands  of  pain 

Another's  terror  crept. 

"Alas!     it  is  a  fearful  thing 

To  feel  another's  guilt! 
For,  right  within,  the  sword  of  Sin 

Pierced  to  its  poisoned  hilt, 
And  as  molten  lead  were  the  tears  we  shed 
s^^  For  the  blood  we  had  not  spilt." 

"Do  you  know,"  says  William  Morris, 
"when  I  see  a  poor  devil  drunk  and  brutal, 
I  always  feel,  quite  apart  from  aisthetical 
perceptions,  a  sort  of  shame,  as  if  I  myself 
had  some  hand  in  it? "     The  social  conscience 


SIN  21 

which  makes  us  feel  responsible  for  all 
transgression  and  failure,  must  bring  with 
it  a  sense  of  guilty  complicity  which 
numbers  us  self-reproachingly  with  the 
transgressors. 

But  after  all  there  remains  this  difference 
between  Jesus  and  ourselves:  we  belong  with 
the  transgressors,  and  He  does  not.  We 
have  actually  added  to  the  sin  of  the  world. 
Our  thoughtlessness  has  left  men  to  struggle 
vainly  by  themselves,  while  a  word  from  us 
might  have  turned  the  day.  Our  cowardice 
has  kept  us  from  speaking  out  what  others 
needed  to  hear  to  brace  them  for  their  battle. 
Our  self-indulgence  has  crippled  a  good  cause 
with  lack  of  adequate  support.  Our  negative 
attitude  has  weakened  the  influence  of  right- 
eousness. Our  compromise  has  befogged  the 
issue  of  Christian  and  un-Christian.  But  He  — 
the  closer  He  comes  to  us  in  His  amazing 
sympathy,  the  farther  He  seems  from  us  in 
His  utter  unlikeness.  "Holy,  guileless,  un- 
defiled,  separated  from  sinners,  and  made 
high^  than  the  heavens,"  we  say  with  that 
New  Testament  writer  who  most  emphasized 
Jesus'  complete    sharing  of    our  human  expe- 


22      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

riences.     What  did  it  mean  to  Him  to  be  num- 
bered with  transgressors? 

All  sympathy  in  a  world  of  imperfect  beings 
involves  pain.  Schopenhauer  compares  men 
to  porcupines,  trying  to  huddle  together  for 
warmth  and  presently  repelled  again  by  the 
contact  of  their  prickles.  But  what  of  the 
incomparably  sensitive  Jesus,  as  His  sympathy 
drew  Him  toward  men  whose  every  thought 
and  emotion  must  have  hurt  Him?  Charlotte 
Bronte  wrote  frankly  to  G.  H.  Lewes,  the  phil- 
osopher and  man  of  letters  whose  name  is 
linked  with  the  story  of  George  Eliot;  "You 
w^ould  often  jar  terribly  on  some  feelings,  with 
whose  recoil  and  quiver  you  could  not  possibly 
sympathize."  What  was  the  "recoil  and 
quiver"  in  the  acute  conscience  of  the  Son  of 
God  when  He  shared  our  life  with  its  home 
ties  and  friendships,  its  town  gossip  and  national 
ambitions,  its  push  for  gain  and  fame,  its 
business  relations  and  church  fellowship?  It 
is  His  sinless  conscience  which  is  the  unique 
factor.  Paul  speaks  of  filling  up  on  his  part 
the  deficit  in  Christ's  sufferings,  but  he  asks, 
^^Was  Paul  crucified  for  you?"  It  is  not  the 
crucifixion   that   matters,    but   the   Crucified. 


SIN  23 

"He"  —  not  His  death  —  "is  the  propitiation 
for  our  sins."  That  He  with  His  recoil  and 
quiver  should  still  have  loved  us  so  intensely 
that,  when  He  felt  the  gulf  fixed  between  God 
and  sinners,  He  thought  Himself  on  our  side 
of  the  breach  and  numbered  Himself  with  the 
transgressors  —  that  is  the  marvel.  It  is  that 
which  puts  the  tone  of  unfailing  wonder  into 
our  voices  when  we  say,  "The  Son  of  God 
loved  me,  and  gave  Himself  up  for  me. " 


DUTY 


II 

DUTY 

1  John  3:  16:  "Hereby  know  we  love,  because  He 
laid  down  His  life  for  us;  and  we  ought  to  lay  down  our 
lives  for  the  brethren. " 

DUTY  for  the  men  of  the  New  Testament 
is  love.  John  would  have  agreed 
with  Paul,  when  he  wrote:  "Owe  no 
man  anything,  save  to  love  one  another:  for 
he  that  loveth  his  neighbour  hath  fulfilled  the 
law."  And  love  is  a  debt  we  must  continue 
to  owe.  There  are  no  moral  bankruptcy  pro- 
ceedings through  which  we  can  pass  and  be 
discharged.  So  long  as  we  exist,  here  or  here- 
after, we  owe  love. 

But  our  best  words  suffer  from  usage.  Lan- 
guage is  liable  to  great  wear  and  tear.  People 
use  the  word  "love"  for  their  delight  in  a 
particular  variety  of  china,  their  fondness  for 
a  kitten,  their  appreciation  of  flowers,  as  well 
as  for  their  devotion  to  human  beings.  And 
even  when  the  word  is  confined  to  the  feelings 
of  person  for  person,  it  may  represent  a  vast 

27 


28      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

variety  of  emotions  —  the  doting  affection  that 
spoils,  the  domineering  attachment  that  bullies, 
the  blind  infatuation  that  undiscriminatingly 
adores,  the  passion  that  demoralizes,  as  well 
as  the  love  described  in  the  thirteenth  chapter 
of  First  Corinthians.  Whether  the  Greek  word 
for  **love'*  which  John  employs  be,  as  some 
scholars  have  held,  "born  within  the  bosom  of 
revealed  religion"  and  unused  by  heathen 
writers,  or,  as  others  more  recently  have 
sought  to  prove,  a  word  in  use  in  the  vernacular 
adopted  by  the  Christians,  John  is  careful  to 
give  it  a  precise  definition.  "Hereby  know  we 
love,  because  He  laid  down  His  life  for  us." 
The  cross  defined  love  for  him.  It  was  not 
liking,  but  devotion;  not  an  emotion  but  a 
service,  and  a  service  regarded  as  an  obli- 
gation, so  that  John  can  attach  the  word 
"ought"  to  it.  "Because  He  ...  we 
ought  to  lay  down  our  lives  for  the  brethren. " 
You  may  already  have  noticed  a  slight 
difference  between  the  translations  of  our  text 
in  the  Authorized  and  Revised  Versions. 
It  used  to  read,  "Hereby  perceive  we  the  love 
of  God:''  but  the  revisers  felt  that  the  words 
"of  God,"  which  are  not  in  the  Greek,  did 


DUTY  29 

not  need  to  be  added.  Love  is  the  same 
whether  in  God  or  in  man.  This  needs  to 
be  insisted  on.  Love  has  often  been  repre- 
sented as  a  duty  in  man,  but  as  a  mere  favour 
on  the  part  of  God.  We  feel  that  we  ought 
to  love  Him  and  one  another,  but  we  have 
hesitated  to  say  that  God  ought  to  love  us. 
But  the  Bible  writers  are  exceeding  bold.  They 
know  that  God  never  asks  His  children  to  say 
*' ought"  in  connection  with  anything  with 
which  He  has  not  already  felt  an  "ought." 
We  are  to  be  perfect  as,  not  otherwise  than. 
He  is  perfect.  When  God  fathered  us  and 
brought  us  into  being,  He  obliged  Himself  to 
love  us,  and  to  do  for  us  all  that  love  involves. 
A  century  ago  it  was  the  custom  for  children 
to  address  their  parents  as  those  to  whom  they 
were  greatly  indebted  as  the  authors  of  their 
existence.  To-day  we  regard  parenthood  as 
a  responsibility,  and  emphasize  far  more  the 
obligation  which  rests  on  them  than  on  their 
children.  The  obligation,  to  be  sure,  is  mutual ; 
but  it  rests  primarily  on  those  who,  without 
their  children's  will,  bring  them  into  being. 
God's  fatherhood  puts  Him  in  debt  to  us.  He 
owes  us  love.     Duty  is  the  same  for  God  and 


30      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

man;  love  is  for  both  the  fulfilling  of  the  law; 
and  "hereby  know  we  love,  because  He  laid 
down  His  life  for  us. "  Calvary  is  the  standard 
of  duty,  divine  and  human. 

We  never  understand  the  meaning  of  the 
cross  for  God  unless  we  recall  what  is  implied 
in  John's  description  of  His  character:  "God 
is  love."  Then  Calvary  becomes  inevitable 
from  all  eternity.  From  the  moment  when 
God  gave  another  being  life.  His  parental 
responsibility  required  Him  to  devote  Him- 
self to  that  other's  perfecting.  If  His  child 
sinned.  He  must  suffer  with  and  for  him,  and 
He  cannot  cease  loving  him,  nor  doing  for  him 
all  that  love  endlessly  suggests.  The  Lamb 
was  slain  in  the  conscience  of  God  from  the 
foundation  of  the  world.  From  the  moment 
there  was  a  world  for  which  God  was  account- 
able, He  could  not  withhold  His  nearest  and 
dearest,  He  could  not  spare  Himself.  He  was  a 
debtor  to  all  on  whom  He  had  brought  the 
miseries  and  exposed  to  the  temptations  of 
life,  so  as  much  as  in  Him  lay  He  was  ready 
to  serve  them.  Calvary  is  the  typical  event 
in  time  through  which  we  look  in  on  God's 
eternal  self-devotion  to  His  children. 


DUTY  31 

The  cross,  then,  is  part  of  God's  justice; 
that  which  He  feels  He  owes  us.  We  speak 
of  the  grace  of  God  sometimes  as  though  all 
that  God  did  for  us  sinners  were  a  sheer  gift 
on  His  part.  No  doubt  all  that  He  is  to  us 
and  does  for  us  is  a  gift  in  the  sense  that  we 
do  nothing  to  deserve  it  nor  to  pay  Him  for  it. 
But  grace  is  obligatory  on  Him.  Forgiveness 
is  not  a  gratuity  which  He  feels  He  may  bestow 
or  refuse.  A  distinguished  theological  pro- 
fessor in  Union  Seminary  a  generation  ago 
preached  a  sermon  entitled  "The  Exercise  of 
Mercy  Optional  with  God,"  and  Thomas 
Chalmers  said  that  "forgiveness  is  a  duty  with 
man  but  a  problem  for  God."  It  is  no  more 
optional  with  Him  than  with  us,  and  it  is  a 
problem  for  us  both.  "He  is  faithful  and  just 
to  forgive  us,"  writes  John,  and  were  He  un- 
forgiving He  would  be  neither.  "God,"  said 
Socrates,  "may  forgive  sin,  but  I  do  not  see 
how  He  can."  "God,"  says  this  writer, 
"must  forgive  sin,  and  can  do  no  other  without 
ceasing  to  be  the  God  we  know  in  Christ." 
Jesus  did  not  consider  His  suffering  and  death 
an  optional  service  which  He  was  not  bound 
to  render  to  His  brethren.     "The  Son  of  man 


32      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

must  suffer."  "Ought  not  the  Christ  to  have 
suffered  these  things?"  What  claim  had  we 
on  Him?  The  family  claim  —  we  are  His 
brothers.  Love  is  not  a  condescension  on  His 
part,  but  an  obligation,  and  an  obligation  which 
is  not  met  by  possessing  a  benevolent  dispo- 
sition, a  good  nature  that  would  harm  nobody, 
but  by  a  sacrificial  service  that  pours  out  the 
soul  unto  death,  that  gives  until  here  is  literally 
nothing  left  ungiven.  And  this  is  not  charity, 
but  duty;  not  being  kind  merely,  but  being  just. 
Men  have  sometimes  pictured  God's  mercy 
and  His  justice  as  conflicting  characteristics. 
The  Talmud  in  a  striking  passage  says,  "God 
prays,  and  His  prayer  is  this:  *Be  it  My  will 
that  My  mercy  overpower  My  justice.'"  But 
the  Bible  knows  of  no  such  strife.  "He  is 
a  just  God  and  a  Saviour."  His  justice  and 
His  saving  are  connected  by  an  "and"  not  a 
"but."  He  could  not  be  just  without  saving. 
Mr.  Huxley  wrote  to  Charles  Kingsley:  "The 
absolute  justice  of  the  system  of  things  is  as 
clear  to  me  as  any  scientific  fact.  The  gravi- 
tation of  sin  to  sorrow  is  as  certain  as  that  of 
the  earth  to  the  sun  —  and  more  so  —  for 
experimental  proof  of  the  fact  is  within  reach  of 


DUTY  83 

all;  nay  is  before  us  all  in  our  own  lives,  if 
we  had  but  the  eyes  to  see  it."  Mr.  Huxley 
would  have  refused  to  say  that  forgiving  and 
redeeming  love  was  clear  to  him  in  the  facts 
of  the  universe,  but  in  the  same  letter  he  says 
of  his  own  family  experience,  "Love  opened 
up  to  me  a  view  of  the  sanctity  of  human  nature, 
and  impressed  me  with  a  deep  sense  of  respon- 
sibility." If  we  read  the  facts  of  the  universe 
with  the  insight  of  Jesus  and  are  convinced  that 
behind  and  in  all  is  a  God  of  love,  that  God 
must  as  surely  be  impressed  with  "a  deep  sense 
of  responsibility,"  and  the  justice  which  in- 
evitably connects  sin  with  sorrow  must  as 
certainly  link  it  with  redemption.  There  is  as 
reliable  a  gravitation  of  love  to  sin,  as  of  sin 
to  sorrow.  The  Son  of  man,  who  comes 
saying  ''I  must"  as  He  seeks  and  saves  the  lost, 
is  not  better  than  His  God  and  Father  but 
like  Him.  He  has  caught  His  "must"  from 
Him.  Love  naturally  regards  redemption 
as  duty.  Love  beareth,  belie veth,  hopeth, 
endureth  all  things  and  never  faileth.  That 
is  love's  nature.  It  cannot  do  less  and  be  love. 
So  long  as  one  child  of  God  remains  in  sin,  his 
Father  must  and  will  lay  down  His  life  for  him. 


34      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

Some  may  feel  that  to  call  love  for  us  God's 
duty  is  to  reduce  it  to  a  right  that  we  can  de- 
mand of  Him,  and  to  rob  it  of  that  amazing- 
ness  which  led  the  first  Christians  to  exclaim, 
*' Behold  what  manner  of  love  the  Father  hath 
bestowed  upon  us!"  We  need  not  fear  if  we 
look  at  the  love  of  God  through  Christ's  cross 
that  it  will  ever  cease  to  be  a  marvel.  No 
thoughtful  man  can  look  at  Calvary  without 
calling  the  cross  "wondrous"  and  such  love 
"amazing."  Perhaps  the  conscience  of  Him 
who  feels  that  He  is  obliged  to  go  as  far  as  this 
for  men,  most  of  whom  He  has  never  seen, 
none  of  whom  can  wholly  please  Him, 
and  many  of  whom  pain  Him  unutterably, 
is  the  crowning  marvel.  The  sense  of 
obligation  revealed  at  Calvary  is  its  supreme 
surprise. 

"And  we  ought  ..."  If  the  cross  of 
Jesus  reveals  a  love  that  says  "must,"  its  effect 
is  to  redeem  us  to  feeling  a  like  obligation. 
Sin  is  irresponsibility,  failure  to  recognize  and 
meet  the  claims  men  have  on  us.  Sin  is  any 
want  of  conformity  unto  the  conscience  of 
God  shown  in  Christ.  The  man  who  fell 
among  thieves  on  the  road  to  Jericho  may  have 


DUTY  35 

been  extremely  careless.  He  may  have  dis- 
played his  money  in  a  way  that  positively  in- 
vited robbery.  But  however  much  of  a  fool 
he  may  have  been,  there  in  his  wretchedness 
he  had  a  claim  upon  the  humanity  of  every 
passer-by.  Priest  and  Levite  ought  to  have 
laid  down  their  lives  for  their  brother.  Their 
sin  was  their  lack  of  love's  sense  of  obligation. 
The  Good  Samaritan  (were  we  interpreting 
him  in  the  light  of  present  conditions)  would 
not  only  have  felt  responsible  for  the  half- 
dead  man  at  the  roadside,  but  for  other  possi- 
ble victims  who  might  meet  the  same  mishap, 
and  beside  caring  for  the  wounded  sufferer, 
he  would  have  seen  to  it  that  the  government 
took  effective  measures  to  protect  all  future 
travellers  on  that  road.  Further,  his  love  would 
think  of  the  highwaymen  and  recognize  that 
they  too  had  a  claim  on  him.  He  must  spend 
and  be  spent  for  their  reclamation.  And  none 
of  this  would  be  charity  on  his  part,  but  duty; 
not  something  he  might  omit  without  blame, 
but  something  he  must  do. 

Would  that  we  could  get  the  "ought" 
of  love  into  our  consciences!  There  is  an 
exacting    parable    of    our    Lord's    that    most 


36      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

Christians  forget.  It  is  that  in  which  the 
master  orders  the  slave  who  has  just  come  in 
from  work  outside  to  serve  him  at  table,  and 
Jesus  asks:  "Has  the  slave  any  favour  with 
his  master  because  he  did  what  he  was  told? 
Even  so  ye  also,  when  ye  shall  have  done  all 
the  things  that  are  commanded  you  say, 
*We  are  simply  servants:  we  have  done  that 
which  it  was  our  duty  to  do.'  "  If  love  masters 
us,  we  must  do  all  that  it  prompts  without  feel- 
ing that  we  are  going  beyond  our  duty.  Our 
extreme  of  self-sacrifice  deserves  no  praise 
from  God  or  man.  Millions  may  be  exclaim- 
ing, *' Worthy  is  the  Lamb  that  hath  been 
slain!"  but  we  may  be  sure  that  Jesus  does 
not  consider  that  He  has  done  anything 
meritorious.  He  has  done  His  duty  by  us; 
that  is  all.  How  free  from  the  desire  for 
recognition  and  the  consequent  dishearten- 
ment  when  we  are  not  appreciated  would  we 
be,  if  only  His  "ought"  were  our  imperative! 
And  how  refreshing  it  is  to  find  any  one  who 
surprises  us  by  his  generosity  and  self-sacrifice, 
and  when  we  thank  him,  looks  astonished  and 
says,  "You  need  not  feel  grateful.  I've 
merely  done  what  I  should!"     It  is  only  they 


DUTY  37 

who  are  dominated  by  love's  "ought"  within 
themselves,  who  are  adult  sons  of  God.  All 
others  are  children,  whose  judgment  cannot 
be  trusted  and  who  must  be  urged  and  coaxed 
into  doing  right.  But  the  man  with  a  con- 
science set  by  the  cross  keeps  time  with  God 
and  can  be  relied  on  to  be  correct  in  life's 
every  relation. 

"And  we  ought  to  lay  down  our  lives,^'  A 
recent  acute  observer  of  social  morals  writes: 
"It  is  not  an  exaggeration  to  say  that  un- 
selfishness makes  no  effect  on  the  London 
streets.  Decency  does,  respectability  does, 
and  in  a  certain  degree  courtesy  does;  but  the 
great  note  of  Christianity  —  selflessness  — 
makes  no  sound  in  the  symphony  of  the  public 
streets."  Does  it  in  the  Christian  churches? 
How  many  of  us  give  the  impression  of  hav- 
ing laid  down  our  lives  in  the  sense  that  we 
have  placed  them  unreservedly  at  the  disposal 
of  the  Kingdom,  and  the  only  question  in  our 
minds  when  some  additional  appeal  meets  us 
is,  "Have  I  time  and  strength  for  this?  or  is  it 
of  more  moment  than  something  else  that  has 
been  claiming  me?"  When  one  thinks  how 
many  of  us  have  to  be  roused  by  a  harrowing 


38      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

plea  before  we  feel  in  the  mood  to  give,  and 
pled  with  by  some  zealous  worker  before 
we  will  devote  part  of  our  unoccupied  time  to 
Christian  service,  and  coerced  by  the  impor- 
tunities of  friends  to  accept  a  position  of  re- 
sponsibility in  some  public  organization,  it 
can  hardly  be  said  that  we  give  the  appearance 
of  lives  laid  down.  We  must  rigorously  test 
ourselves  by  the  cross.  To  what  extent  do 
people  feel  that  we  are  at  their  disposal,  so 
that  they  can  draw  on  us  for  sympathy,  counsel, 
inspiration,  assistance,  as  though  we  were  a 
bank  account  standing  in  their  name?  As 
we  scan  our  assets  in  education,  means,  in- 
fluence, leisure,  opportunity,  acquaintance, 
personality,  how  completely  are  they  invested 
for  the  Kingdom?  *'He  poured  out  His  soul 
unto  death"  —  is  there  any  business  dealing 
or  social  intercourse  into  which  we  do  not 
put  our  souls^  Can  any  one  say  of  us,  "Yes, 
I  met  him  in  connection  with  a  transaction, 
or  I  knew  him  socially,  and  found  him  able, 
or  clever,  or  pleasant,  or  even  obliging,  but  I 
never  was  aware  that  I  was  in  touch  with  a 
soul?"  "If  thou  draw  out  thy  soul  to  the 
hungry, "  writes  a  prophet  —  but  a  hungry  man 


DUTY  39 

wants  bread.  No,  he  wants  bread  and  us.  He 
has  a  right  to  find  the  loaf  we  give  him  an  incarn- 
ation of  ourselves,  our  brotherly  regard  for  him. 
"The  gift  without  the  giver  is  bare.'* 
Some  one  has  described  the  Christian  life 
as  "infinite  love  in  ordinary  intercourse."  It 
must  be  in  ordinary  intercourse,  so  that  a  life 
laid  down  does  not  mean  a  life  stripped  of  the 
comforts  and  enjoyments  that  come  to  us  in 
connection  with  the  positions  in  the  world  we 
fill.  It  is  not  a  synonym  for  a  life  reduced  to 
the  barest  necessities.  It  means,  to  be  sure, 
a  life  freed  from  every  cumbering  luxury,  from 
every  self-indulgence  that  consumes  thought 
or  energy  or  time  or  means  that  could  be 
better  employed.  But  essentially  it  is  the 
life  which  has  the  sense  of  being  owned  by  men; 
and,  as  belonging  to  them,  spontaneously 
answers  their  needs  with  the  feeling  that  they 
are  entitled  to  its  all.  Scott's  old  servant, 
Tom  Purdie,  once  remarked,  "Sir  Walter 
always  speaks  to  every  man  as  if  he  were  his 
born  brother."  To  let  our  very  speech  and 
attitude  convey  the  impression  that  we  rec- 
ognize men's  claim  of  kinship  on  us,  to  let  them 
feel  that  with  as  much  as  in  us  is,  we  are  at 


40      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

their  service,  to  make  them  certain  that  our 
refusals  are  never  due  to  lack  of  heart  but 
to  our  obligation  to  other  and  superior  claims, 
to  convince  them  that  we  are  without  self- 
seeking  and  are  concerned  solely  to  be  just  — 
that  is  to  let  them  find  in  us  a  life  laid  down, 
a  conscience  kin  to  that  disclosed  at  Calvary. 
"And  we  ought  to  lay  down  our  lives  for 
the  brethren.'''  Scholars  tell  us  that  John  was 
thinking  only  of  fellow  Christians,  when  he 
said  brethren.  One  may  wish  that  he  had  not 
restricted  his  vision.  But  limitations  to  the 
sphere  of  duty  are  not  an  unmixed  evil.  It  is 
easy  to  talk  glibly  of  serving  humanity  and  to 
forget  to  pass  the  salt  to  the  man  who  sits 
next  us  at  table,  to  think  of  placing  our  lives 
at  a  world's  disposal  and  neglect  the  small 
attentions  which  mean  so  much  to  those  in  our 
own  homes.  Hogarth  never  drew  a  more 
useful  moral  than  in  the  cartoon  which  repre- 
sents a  man  in  the  debtors'  prison  occupying 
himself  with  plans  for  the  payment  of  the 
national  debt.  The  father  of  the  distin- 
guished master  of  Balliol,  Benjamin  Jowett,  Sr., 
let  his  own  business  go  to  pieces,  and  reduced 
his  family  to  poverty,  while  he  wrote  letters 


DUTY  41 

to  Australia  on  the  proper  treatment  of  the 
aborigines  and  attempted  a  new  metrical 
version  of  the  psalter  for  the  Church  of  England. 
When  Paul  spoke  of  working  "that  which  is 
good  toward  all  men,"  he  added,  lest  such 
universal  devotion  should  become  a  vague, 
general  philanthropy,  "especially  toward  them 
that  are  of  the  household  of  faith";  and  when 
he  enforces  a  man's  duty  to  provide  for  his 
own,  he  insists,  "specially  they  of  his  own 
household. "  Our  duties  surround  us  in  a  series 
of  concentric  circles.  We  have  to  exercise 
conscience  to  function  accurately  and  thor- 
oughly at  short  range  first;  then  the  circle  can 
widen  out  into  a  more  inclusive  round  of  obli- 
gation. It  is  through  fidelity  to  the  family 
in  childhood  that  we  become  fitted  for  friend- 
ship in  youth;  through  patriotism  that  we 
develop  into  responsible  citizens  of  the  world; 
through  faithfulness  in  a  church  home  that 
we  grow  to  share  with  all  Christians  the  re- 
sponsibility for  the  universal  Kingdom  of  God. 
The  danger  is  that  the  circle  which  marks  off 
the  narrower  sphere  for  which  we  are  specially 
answerable,  and  which  should  be  just  an 
imaginary  line  like  the  parallels  of  latitude  and 


42      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

longitude  on  our  maps,  convenient  guides 
for  our  moral  navigation,  may  become  a  high 
wall  that  shuts  out  every  thing  beyond.  Jesus 
felt  Himself  definitely  sent  to  the  lost  sheep  of 
the  house  of  Israel.  With  His  limited  time 
and  opportunities  He  must  confine  Himself 
to  them.  But  He  had  His  vision  of  the  king- 
doms of  the  world  and  the  glory  of  them,  and 
recognized  that  He  had  other  sheep  not  of 
that  fold  whom  He  must  also  bring.  They 
too  had  a  claim  on  His  love,  and  for  them  also 
He  laid  down  His  life.  Paul  was  debtor  both 
to  Greeks  and  to  barbarians.  There  was  no 
man  in  God's  earth  that  had  not  a  right  to 
the  unsearchable  riches  that  were  his,  and 
gladly  he  wore  out  his  life  to  present  every 
man  perfect  in  Christ.  Our  offering  to  foreign 
missions  is  no  gift.  As  truly  as  our  own  fam- 
ilies have  claims  upon  us,  that  we  dare  not 
repudiate,  the  world-wide  family  of  God  own 
whatever  we  possess,  and  are  entitled  to  share 
our  most  prized  wealth  —  Jesus  Christ.  Mis- 
sions are  not  for  us  optional,  but  obligatory, 
not  charity,  but  justice.  When  we  say  "breth- 
ren," we  cannot  exclude  one  child  of  God, 
however  remote  and  backward  in  development. 


DUTY  43 

**We  ought  to  lay  down  our  lives  for  the 
brethren." 

A  moment  ago  we  were  speaking  of  the 
Christian  life  as  "infinite  love  in  ordinary 
intercourse."  But  that  is  hardly  correct.  It 
is  extraordinary  intercourse  that  Christ  strove 
to  create,  a  sense  of  world-wide  kinship  and 
responsibility.  His  cross  was  to  draw  all  men 
to  Himself,  and  it  is  only  when  all  have  fellow- 
ship one  with  another  that  His  blood  cleanses 
from  all  sin.  Until  then  there  remain  the  sins 
of  imperfect  sympathy  and  prejudice,  of 
misunderstanding  and  contracted  conscience. 
Only  when  "brethren"  means  for  us  everybody, 
past,  present,  and  to  come,  and  only  when 
everybody  means  enough  to  us  to  demand  and 
gain  from  us  a  life  laid  down,  have  we  come 
under  the  atoning  power  of  Christ's  death 
making  us  at  one  with  God  and  all  His 
children. 

"Infinite  love  in  extraordinary  intercourse" 
—  infinite  in  the  sense  that  it  exacts  our  all, 
and  that  nothing  about  us  is  not  laid  down! 
We  must  guard  against  belittling  the  heroism 
required  of  the  lowliest  Christian.  Gethsemane 
is  proof  that  even  the  Son  of  God  had  to  battle 


44      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

to  bring  Himself  to  lay  down  His  life.  The 
tendency  of  our  tolerant  age  is  to  make  the 
Kingdom  as  inclusive  as  possible  and  to  reduce 
the  demands  made  of  Christians  to  a  minimum. 
The  result  is  a  cheap  Christianity.  But  a 
Christianity  which  costs  little  and  comes  easy 
cannot  be  Christian.  There  is  nothing  harder 
and  more  exacting  than  to  follow  Jesus.  The 
cross  is  unavoidable;  and  who  is  able  to  say 
invariably,  "Not  as  I  will,  but  as  Thou  wilt?" 
It  is  hopeless  to  face  the  Christian  life  as  a 
duty,  the  discharge  of  our  obligations  to  men. 
Such  love  is  impossible  for  us.  If  this  be  re- 
quired, then  who  can  be  saved? 

But  the  Christian  life  never  presents  itself 
to  us  as  a  duty  merely.  There  is  no  abrupt 
statement  out  of  a  clear  sky.  "You  ought  to 
lay  down  your  lives  for  the  brethren. "  It  reads, 
"He  laid  down  His  life  for  us,  and  we  ..." 
The  Christian  life  is  not  an  achievement  we 
must  force  ourselves  to  accomplish,  but  a 
spirit  which  lays  hold  of  us  at  the  foot  of 
Christ's  cross  and  compels  us  to  embody  it 
in  a  life  laid  down.  "The  love  of  Christ 
constraineth  us."  "There  are  some  natures," 
writes  George  Eliot,  "in  which,  if  they  love  us, 


DUTY  45 

we  are  conscious  of  having  a  sort  of  baptism 
and  consecration:  they  bind  us  over  to  recti- 
tude and  purity  by  their  pure  belief  about  us; 
and  our  sins  become  that  worst  kind  of  sac- 
rilege which  tears  down  the  invisible  altar  of 
trust. "  Jesus'  death  was  His  supreme  demon- 
stration of  His  trust  in  us.  "For  their  sakes 
I  sanctify  Myself,  that  they  ..."  If  He 
did  all  that  love  could  for  us,  and  let  God 
through  Him  reveal  Himself  as  doing  ffis 
divine  all,  He  was  confident  that  our  con- 
sciences would  become  sensitive  to  a  like 
obligation,  and  that  love  would  be  a  bounden 
duty  we  could  not  fail  to  fulfil  to  our  nearest 
and  remotest  kinsmen  in  the  Father's  family, 
in  life's  ordinary  and  extraordinary  inter- 
course —  a  bounden  duty  we  were  irresistibly 
inspired  to  discharge.  Because  He  laid  down 
His  life  for  us.  He  knew  there  would  be  a  com- 
pelling and  empowering  spirit  within  us,  saying, 
"And  we  ought  to  lay  down  our  lives  for  the 
brethren. ' '     Was  He  mistaken  ? 


MAN 


Ill 

MAN 

Galatians  2:20:  "Who  loved  me,  and  gave  Himself 
up  for  me. " 

1  Corinthians  8:11:  "The  brother  for  whose  sake 
Christ  died." 

ONE  who  stands  on  the  shore  of  a  lake 
on  a  moonlit  evening  sees  a  silvery 
band  of  light  running  across  the  water 
directly  to  his  feet.  He  may  reason  with 
himself  that  the  moon's  reflected  light  is 
diffused  with  equal  brilliancy  over  the  surface 
of  our  globe  for  many  hundred  miles  about  the 
spot  where  he  happens  to  be;  but  do  what  he 
will  he  cannot  make  that  path  of  light  seem 
broader,  nor  deflect  it  from  coming  straight 
toward  him. 

It  is  so  when  one  looks  at  the  cross  of  Christ. 
We  may  remind  ourselves  that  Jesus  died  for 
all  men;  that  the  "many"  of  whom  He  was 
thinking  when  He  called  His  life  a  ransom  were 
primarily  those  of  His  own  generation;  and 
that  in  any  case  it  is  inconceivable  that  we 
49 


50      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

individually  should  have  been  present  to  His 
mind,  as  He  hung  in  anguish  on  Calvary;  but 
as  our  eyes  cannot  but  see  the  moon-beam 
connecting  the  light  from  the  sky  specifically 
with  us,  our  consciences  cannot  help  bringing 
home  the  cross  of  Christ  personally  to 
ourselves. 

We  may  explain  this  sense  of  a  personal 
connection  with  that  supreme  tragedy  in 
history  in  a  variety  of  ways.  The  inevitable 
effect  of  the  cross  on  thoughtful  people  is  to 
awaken  their  consciences;  and  when,  with  sen- 
sitive and  susceptive  consciences,  we  think 
of  the  circumstances  which  caused  the  cruci- 
fixion of  Jesus,  we  are  aware  that  this  is  a 
family  catastrophe,  in  which  the  actors  are 
our  kinsmen,  and  the  blood  of  the  Victim  stains 
us  as  sharers  of  our  brothers'  crime.  Further, 
as  we  scan  the  motives  of  Christ's  murderers 
—  Pharisee  and  Sadducee,  Roman  politician 
and  false  friend,  bawling  rabble  and  undis' 
criminating  soldiery  —  they  seem  strangely 
familiar  to  us.  They  have  all  been,  they  are 
still,  alive  by  turns  in  us.  We  have  been  and 
are  Caiaphas  and  Pilate  and  Herod  and  Judas 
Iscariot.     The    harmless    spark    of    electricity 


MAN  51 

that  greets  the  touch  of  one's  hand  on  a  metal 
knob  on  a  winter's  day  is  one  with  the  bolt  of 
lightning  that  shatters  a  giant  tree.  The 
selfish  impulse,  the  narrow  prejudice,  the  ig- 
norant suspicion,  the  callous  indifference,  which 
frequently  dominate  us  and  determine  our  de- 
cisions, are  one  with  that  cruel  combination 
of  motives  which  drove  the  nails  in  the  hands 
and  feet  of  the  Son  of  man.  Still  further, 
the  suffering  of  Jesus  never  seems  to  an  acute 
conscience  something  that  happened  once  but 
is  over  now.  The  Figure  that  hung  and  bled 
on  the  tree  centuries  ago  until  He  cried  in 
victorious  relief,  "It  is  finished,"  becomes 
indissolubly  joined  in  our  thought  with  every 
life  to-day  that  is  the  victim  of  similar  misun- 
derstanding and  neglect,  injustice  and  brutality 
— with  every  life  in  pain  or  poverty  or  loneliness 
or  iniquity;  and,  while  our  sense  of  social  re- 
sponsibility charges  us  with  complicity  in  all 
the  wrong  and  woe  under  the  sun,  that  haunting 
Form  on  Calvary  seems  to  hang  before  our  eyes, 
and 

"Makes  me  feel  it  was  my  sin, 
As  though  no  other  sin  there  were. 
That  was  to  Him  who  bears  the  world 
A  load  that  He  could  scarcely  bear.'* 


52      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

It  may  be  felt  that  much  of  this  is  imagi- 
native exaggeration.  After  all  we  were  not 
members  of  the  Sanhedrin  who  condemned 
Jesus,  nor  the  Roman  procurator  who  ordered 
His  execution,  nor  the  scoffing  soldiers  who  car- 
ried it  out.  But,  although  our  explanation  of 
it  may  be  faulty,  for  our  eyes  the  path  of 
moonlight  on  the  water  is  an  inescapable  fact. 
We  cannot  look  without  having  it  stare  us 
in  the  face.  That  band  of  silvery  glory  makes 
for  us  an  inseparable  part  of  the  scene.  For 
our  consciences  the  charge  of  participation  in 
the  murder  of  the  Son  of  God  is  an  equally 
inescapable  moral  fact.  It  forms  an  unfor- 
getable  element  in  our  outlook  upon  obli- 
gation, giving  our  life  its  tragic  seriousness. 
It  forces  upon  us  the  conviction  that  it  is  all 
too  possible  for  us  to  repeat  the  crime  of  Gol- 
gotha, and  by  doing  or  failing  to  do,  directly 
or  indirectly,  for  one  of  the  least  of  Christ's 
brethren,  to  crucify  Him  afresh  and  put  Him 
to  an  open  shame.  As  real  as  is  the  beauty  of 
the  band  of  moonlight  on  the  lake  to  us,  so 
grimly  real  is  our  personal  implication  in  the 
death  of  Jesus. 

But  it  is  not  only  this  consciousness  of  our 


MAN  53 

accountability  for  the  crucifixion  that  a  look 
at  Calvary  brings  home  to  us.  The  cross 
casts  not  a  black  streak  of  shadowing  disgrace 
but  a  radiant  gleam  of  glory  toward  us. 
"Who  loved  me,  and  gave  Himself  up  for 
me." 

We  Christians  must  always  puzzle  outsiders 
by  what  seems  to  them  our  amazing  conceit 
when  we  speak  of  God's  personal  interest  in  us. 
Such  a  saying  as  *'The  very  hairs  of  your  head 
are  all  numbered"  sounds  like  preposterous 
self-importance.  If  there  be  a  Deity,  however 
beneficent,  behind  and  in  all  the  mysterious 
forces  of  this  universe,  Creator  of  continents 
and  oceans  and  skies,  Lord  of  all  lives  past, 
present,  and  to  come,  how  can  there  be  a  direct 
and  individual  relationship  between  Him  and 
each  of  the  myriads  of  human  beings?  There 
is  much  in  the  look  of  history  with  its  swarm- 
like movements  of  humanity,  with  its  record 
of  the  slow  evolution  of  man  from  lowly  begin- 
nings in  savagery,  with  its  apparent  disregard 
of  the  individual  in  the  interest  of  the  race, 
to  confirm  this  skepticism.  There  is  more, 
perhaps,  in  the  look  of  the  facts  of  human  life 
to-day  with  statistics  of  birth  and  death  rates. 


54      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

of  the  number  of  criminals  and  insane  persons 
in  every  thousand  of  the  population,  of  the 
ratio  of  paupers  and  suicides;  with  the  bewilder- 
ing effect  crowds  have  on  us,  robbing  us  of  all 
sense  of  the  individuality  of  those  who  compose 
them;  with  the  depressing  impression  given  by 
the  uninteresting  character  of  the  majority 
of  faces;  to  render  the  Christian  view  absurd. 
Think  of  the  line  of  faces  opposite  one  in  a  street 
car !  Jesus's  own  faith  rested  not  on  His  obser- 
vation of  humanity,  but  on  His  personal 
experience  of  what  God  was  to  Him.  That 
experience,  in  so  far  as  we  have  shared  it,  must 
assure  us  that  the  image  of  a  Father  for  whom 
we  each  have  a  special  significance  is  the  picture 
to  which  the  facts  most  nearly  correspond. 
No  other  explanation  does  justice  to  our  in- 
dividuality, nor  to  the  personalness  of  our  con- 
tacts with  God,  if  we  have  had  any  genuine 
contact  at  all.  And  as  for  the  cross,  which  is 
the  point  at  which  the  divine  makes  its  deepest 
impress  on  us  and  comes  closest  to  us,  we  can- 
not help  feeling  a  direct  line  of  personal  de- 
votion running  from  Calvary  toward  us.  Call 
it  fanciful  if  you  will.  There  are  dependable 
laws  of  optics  which  make  it  inevitable  that 


MAN  55 

a  normal  pair  of  human  eyes  must  see  a  moon- 
beam coming  toward  them.  There  are  as 
inexorable  laws  which  insure  that  the  normal 
human  heart  looking  at  Calvary  shall  feel  love 
reaching  out  and  laying  personal  hold  of  it. 
The  one  is  as  regular  as  the  other.  And  if  the 
result  of  this  outreach  of  love  be  the  formation 
of  a  life-long,  an  eternity-long  intercourse, 
which  only  words  of  personal  relationship 
like  "the  friendship  of  Christ"  and  "the 
fatherhood  of  God'  adequately  describe,  are 
we  not  justified  in  saying,  "Who  loved  me, 
and  gave  Himself  up  for  me  P" 

And  when  we  say  this  with  conviction, 
what  a  light  is  flung  by  the  cross  on  one's 
self! 

"The  grand  comment,  which  displays  at  full 
Our  human  height,  scarce  sever'd  from  divine. 
By  heaven  composed,  was  publish'd  on  the  cross. 
Who  looks  at  that,  and  sees  not  in  himself 
An  awful  stranger,  a  terrestrial  god? 
If  a  God  bleeds.  He  bleeds  not  for  a  worm. " 

There  are  moods  in  which  the  worm  con- 
ception of  humanity  as  applied  to  ourselves 
seems  pitifully  apt.  Most  of  us  must  fre- 
quently despise  ourselves.  We  are  aware  of 
such  contemptible  smallness  —  low  thoughts, 


56      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

petty  feelings,  mean  impulses,  trifling  pur- 
poses, scanty  love.  John  Henry  Newman's 
mother,  when  he  was  at  college,  was  at  one 
time  alarmed  by  reports  of  his  appearance, 
and  wrote  to  inquire  as  to  his  health.  In  reply 
he  said:  "Take  me  when  I  am  most  foolish 
at  home  and  extend  mirth  into  childishness; 
stop  me  short  and  ask  me  then  what  I  think 
of  myself  ...  I  should  seriously  answer 
that  *I  shuddered  at  myself.'"  But  it  takes  a 
considerable  self  to  shudder  at,  and  most  of  us 
are  sickened  by  self-contempt.  We  count  for 
nothing,  accomplish  nothing,  are  nothing. 
Or,  worse  yet,  we  count  as  negatives,  adding 
to  the  retarding  and  demoralizing  forces  in 
society.  Our  thoughtlessness,  our  crass  stu- 
pidity, our  insincerity,  our  miserable  self- 
seeking  and  self -absorption  —  these  stand 
between  ourselves  and  self-respect.  The  affec- 
tion of  others  for  us,  their  generous  esteem, 
while  it  gives  us  huge  satisfaction,  at  times  must 
also  torture  us  by  rousing  the  sense  of  our  unde- 
servingness.  Our  own  ideal  condemns  us.  But 
there  on  the  cross  hangs  our  Ideal,  the 
Conscience  of  our  consciences.  And  lo.  He 
loves  usl 


MAN  57 

It  is  in  the  light  of  that  personal  attachment 
to  us  that  we  assume  infinite  significance  in 
our  own  eyes.     Dr.  Channing  wrote  a  friend, 
"I  have  seldom,  perhaps  never,  met  a  human 
being  who  seemed  to  me  conscious  of  what  was 
in  him."     So  pitifully  few  of  us  look  at  our 
possibilities  by  the  personal  devotion  shown 
for  us  in  the  cross.     We  individually  mean 
every   thing  to    God.      Each  of  us  is  worth 
the  life  of  His  Son.     In  every  mood  of  depres- 
sion and  discouragement,  in  every  moment  of 
self-depreciation,  look  at  the  Crucified!    The 
personalness  of  His  love  is  unmistakable.     He 
must  have  you  and  me.     We  cannot  help  feel- 
ing the  direct  appeal  to  ourselves.     We  each 
have  a  special  place  in  God's  purpose  here  and 
forever,  and  that  devotion  lays  hold  of  us  and 
lifts  us  into  it.     However  despised  in  our  own 
eyes,  God  cannot  replace  us,  and  having  made 
us  "indescribably  ourselves,"  He  deals  with 
each  of  us  as  unique,  and  convinces  us  through 
the  personal  plea  in  the  cross  that  He  cannot 
do   without   us.     The   cross   never   impresses 
us   as   a   wholesale  method   of   drawing   men 
en  masse  to  God,  but  as  a  special  and  most 
intimate    friendly    approach    to    each    of    us, 


58      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

which   we   cannot   sHght   without   completely 
breaking  the  Heart  that  so  loves  us. 

*'As  men  from  men 
Do,  in  the  constitution  of  their  souls. 
Differ,  by  mystery  not  to  be  explained; 
And  as  we  fall  by  various  ways,  and  sink 
One  deeper  than  another,  self-condemned, 
Through  manifold  degrees  of  guilt  and  shame; 
So  manifold  and  various  are  the  ways 
Of  restoration,  fashioned  to  the  steps 
Of  all  infirmity,  and  tending  all 
To  the  same  point,  attainable  by  all  — 
Peace  in  ourselves,  and  union  with  our  God." 

Nor  does  this  individual  appeal  of  the  cross, 
making  each  of  us  feel  that  had  he  been  the 
only  sinner  Christ  would  have  died  for  him, 
render  us  conceited.  While  the  moonlight 
falls  across  the  water  in  a  direct  line  to  us,  the 
shimmering  beauty  of  the  beam  itself,  the 
height  of  the  sky  from  which  the  glory  de- 
scends, the  vastness  of  space  all  about,  sober 
and  subdue  us.  The  Crucified  is  so  far  above 
us  in  the  height  of  His  conscience.  His  special 
devotion  to  us  is  so  astonishing,  the  eternal 
purpose  of  God  with  which  it  surrounds  us 
is  so  illimitable,  that  both  our  greatness  and 
our  littleness,  what  we  may  be  and  what  we 
are  not,  come  over  us  in  the  same  moment. 
We  are  aware  of  a  sting  of  shame  and  a  thrill 


MAN  59 

of  immeasurable  hope  in  the  same  experience, 
when  we  realize  the  personal  meaning  of  the 
cross  for  us,  and  say,  "Who  loved  me,  and 
gave  Himself  up  for  me, " 

But  while  we  stand  on  the  lake  shore  in 
solitary  admiration,  a  friend's  voice  may 
call  us  to  join  him,  and  look  out  over  the  water 
from  his  point  of  view;  then  we  see  that  to  him, 
too,  the  moonlight  makes  a  shining  path.  Paul 
knew  that  the  personal  relation  of  the  Crucified 
to  him  was  equally  true  for  every  man.  He 
reminded  himself  and  others  of  it  when  they 
were  dealing  with  some  trying  or  small  individ- 
ual. When  he  writes  the  Corinthians  about 
the  weak  brother,  the  man  who  is  too  muddle- 
headed  to  be  able  to  draw  entirely  obvious 
distinctions,  and  so  tottering  in  his  Christian 
walk  that  anything  against  which  he  can  stub 
his  toe  gives  him  a  tumble,  he  calls  him  "  the 
brother  for  whom  Christ  died."  It  is  hard  to 
be  considerate  of  a  man  of  this  kind;  hard  not 
to  say:  "He's  a  mere  nonentity;  why  should 
we  be  prevented  from  doing  perfectly  sensible 
things  because  he  is  too  stupid  to  see  their 
reasonableness?  Suppose  he  does  drop  out  of 
the  church,  we  are  not  losing  anything. "     Paul 


60      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

answers,  "You  may  not  feel  that  you  are 
losing  anything;  but  look  at  the  straight  line 
of  devotion  between  the  cross  on  Calvary  and 
that  man  of  no  account!  He  is  the  man  Christ 
died  for." 

When  we  are  speaking  of  persons  with  odd 
peculiarities  we  often  add,  "Well,  it  takes  all 
kinds  of  people  to  make  a  world."  That  is 
a  bit  of  cheap  and  shallow  optimism.  It  takes 
only  Christlike  people  to  make  a  God's  world; 
all  others  more  or  less  unmake  it.  But  there  is 
this  much  of  truth  in  the  common  remark,  that 
it  does  take  all  people  to  make  God's  world. 
The  most  unchristlike  cannot  be  left  out.  He 
must  be  kept,  and  changed,  and  included  in  the 
Kingdom,  or  that  remains  incomplete.  And 
it  is  very  diflBcult  for  us  to  appreciate  that  some 
persons  are  indispensable.  These  are  not  the 
deep-dyed  villains.  We  may  cordially  hiss 
an  lago;  but  we  cannot  help  acknowledging 
that  he  is  enough  of  a  man  to  be  well  worth 
saving.  We  may  speak  with  abhorrence  of  a 
Judas,  and  shudderingly  picture  him  as  going 
"to  his  own  place";  but  he  has  sufficient  dis- 
tinction to  make  a  place  of  his  own.  "Ah 
Sam!"     said  Carlyle  once  to  Froude,  a  propos 


MAN  61 

of  Bishop  Samuel  Wilberforce,  the  typical 
worldly  and  somewhat  unscrupulous  ecclesias- 
tic of  that  generation,  "Ah  Sam!  he  is  a  very 
clever  fellow;  I  do  not  hate  him  near  as  much 
as  I  ought  to  do. "  A  man  with  an  individuality 
of  his  own,  even  when  he  is  thoroughly  bad, 
strikes  us  as  possessing  some  interest  for  his 
Creator.  But  the  weak  brother,  the  person 
without  a  sensible  idea  in  his  head,  or  with 
touchy  feelings  which  get  hurt  where  there  isn't 
anything  hard  or  sharp  enough  to  hurt  him, 
who  at  his  best  is  an  entirely  negligible  factor, 
the  chronic  nobody-in-particular  wherever  you 
happen  to  find  him,  how  would  the  world  be 
the  poorer  for  his  omission?  John  puts  into 
his  Lord's  mouth  bold  words  when  he  hears 
Him  say:  "I  would  thou  wert  cold  or  hot. 
So  because  thou  are  lukewarm,  and  neither 
hot  nor  cold,  I  will  spew  thee  out  of  my  mouth. " 
It  is  the  insipid,  the  characterless,  who  are 
nauseating  to  God  and  man.  But  Paul  pleads 
for  the  nonentity.     He  shared  the  conviction 

that 

"No  creature's  made  so  mean 
But  that,  some  way,  it  boasts,  could  we  investigate. 
Its  supreme  worth :  fulfils  by  ordinance  of  fate, 
Its  momentary  task,  gets  glory  all  its  own, 


62      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

Tastes  triumph  in  the  world,  preeminent,  alone. 
Where  is  the  simple  grain  of  sand,  mid  millions  heaped 
Confusedly  on  the  beach,  but,  did  we  know. 
Has  leaped,  would  we  wait,  i'  the  century,  some  onoc, 
To  the  very  throne  of  things?  —  earth's  brightest  for 

the  nonce. 
When  sunshine  shall  impinge  on  just  that  grain's  facette 
Which  fronts  him  fullest.     .     .     .     Quick  sense  pcroeives 

the  same 
Self-vindicating  flash  illustrate  every  man 
And  woman  of  our  mass,  and  prove,  throughout  the  plan, 
No  detail,  but,  in  place  allotted  it,  was  prime 
And  perfect. 

The  "vindicating  flash"  which  "illustrates" 
the  most  insignificant  nobody  falls  on  him  from 
the  cross.     He  is  the  man  for  whom  Christ  died. 

Mr.  Chesterton  has  said  of  Browning's 
"The  Ring  and  the  Book":  "It  is  the  great 
epic  of  the  age,  because  it  is  the  expression  of 
the  belief,  it  might  almost  be  said  of  the  dis- 
covery, that  no  man  ever  lived  upon  this  earth 
without  possessing  a  point  of  view."  It  was, 
perhaps,  Paul's  discovery  that  no  man  lives 
without  possessing  a  distinct  point  of  view 
toward  Christ's  cross.  He  may  be  blind  to 
his  own  outlook,  and  you  may  have  to  put 
yourself  in  his  place  and  see  it  for  him;  but  a 
glory  path  of  particular  love  for  him  leads 
straight  from  Calvary  to  his  heart. 

We  talk  of  "the  dark  mass  of  heathenism"; 


MAN  63 

we  lump  together  a  crowd  of  lives  under  some 
general  caption  like  "the  unchurched,"  or 
**the  submerged  tenth";  we  are  confronted 
with  statistics  to  show  us  the  appalling  need 
in  this  and  that  direction;  but  we  never  begin 
to  feel  the  full  measure  of  our  obligation  until 
a  discriminating  sympathy  attempts  to  visual- 
ize the  individuals  in  the  throngs  and  connects 
each  in  thought  with  the  personal  love  of  Christ. 
Men  often  speak  slightingly  about  "saving 
souls,"  and  tell  us  that  we  are  rather  to  "save 
society";  but  Christ's  interest  in  a  saved 
society  is  only  for  the  sake  of  the  children  of 
God  whom  it  will  safeguard  and  perfect.  He 
does  not  dwell  on  groups  or  numbers,  but  on 
men  —  "one  sinner  that  repenteth,"  "one  of 
these  little  ones,"  "one  of  these  least."  It  is 
only  when  we  are  convinced  of  Christ's  in- 
dividual concern  in  every  one  of  the  millions  of 
China,  or  of  the  thousands  on  a  congested 
city  block  that  we  are  at  one  with  Him.  We 
then  cease  arguing  about  their  worth,  their 
improvability,  their  need  of  more  justice  or 
better  religion.  What  each  is  to  the  heart  of 
God  in  Christ,  that  and  nothing  less  he  is  to  us. 
There  is  surely  no  aspect  of  the  cross  we  more 


64      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

need  for  practical  use  than  this.     The  best- 
natured  of  us  knows  some  who  tax  him  severely; 
the  most  appreciative  finds  those  in  whom  he 
can   see   nothing   whatever;   the   broadest   in 
sympathy  discovers  some  one  outside  the  pale 
of  even  his  interest;  and  the  great  majority  of 
us,  who  are  not  conspicuously  good-natured, 
or  appreciative,  or  sympathetic,  who  have  a 
fairly  cordial  dislike  for  a  few,  are  bored  by 
some,  see  nothing  attractive  in  many,  and  would 
feel  none  the  poorer  if  most  dropped  out  of 
existence  to-morrow,  must  train  ourselves  to  put 
every  man  on  a  line  between  us  and  Calvary, 
that  we  may  catch  sight  of  that  love-beam 
which  glittera  through  the  world's  indifferent 
darkness    toward    him.     To    adjust    ourselves 
rightly  with  every  man  in  life's  complex  re- 
lationships, to  lengthen  our  patience,  to  soften 
our  roughness,  to  control  our  irritability,  to 
dissipate  our  prejudice,  to  sensitize  our  tact,  to 
lift  us  out  of  ourselves  into  genuine  sympathy 
with  him  so  that  we  render  unto  every  man  his 
due    and    fulfil   that  hardest    of    injunctions, 
"Honour  all  men,"  each  must  be  to  us  "the 
brother  for  whose  sake  Christ  died." 


GOD 


IV 

GOD 

Romans  5:8:  **God  commendeth  His  own  love  toward 
us,  in  that,  while  we  were  yet  sinners,  Christ  died  for  us. " 

1  Corinthians  1  :  23,  24.  "  Christ  crucified  ...  the 
power  of  God,  and  the  wisdom  of  God." 

MARTIN  LUTHER,  commenting  on 
the  First  Commandment,  asks, 
"What  means  it  to  have  a  God,  or 
what  is  God?"  and  answers,  "Whatever  thy 
heart  clings  to,  and  relies  upon,  that  is  properly 
thy  God,"  and  **to  have  a  God  is  nothing  else 
than  to  trust  and  believe  in  Him  with  all  our 
hearts." 

When  we  look  at  Jesus  of  Nazareth  hanging 
on  the  cross,  our  hearts  go  out  to  Him  and 
cling  to  Him  and  give  Him  their  all  in  adoring 
devotion.  He  is  the  divinest  we  know  or 
can  conceive  of.  His  conscience  and  His 
love  bow  us  before  Him.  We  cannot  think 
of  Calvary  without  becoming  awed.  Pal- 
grave,  in  a  diary  of  a  trip  to  Paris    in  1848, 

67 


68      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

records  the  wrecking  of  the  Tuileries,  and  tells 
how  the  mob  suddenly  broke  into  the  chapel 
and  faced  the  picture  of  Christ  over  the  altar. 
"Some  one  cried  out  that  every  one  should 
bare  his  head.  The  crowd  at  once  did  so,  and 
knelt  down,  whilst  the  picture  was  carried  out 
through  the  utmost  silence  —  *you  might  have 
heard  a  fly  buzz'  —  into  a  neighbouring  church. 
Then  the  suspended  wave  of  destruction  rolled 
on."  Instinctively  we  bare  our  heads  and 
kneel  before  the  cross.  The  Crucified  com- 
mands all  our  reverence,  all  our  aiffection, 
all  our  loyalty.  We  have  no  intenser  admi- 
ration left  for  a  better  than  He,  no  more  pros- 
trate homage  for  a  loftier.  He  is  for  us  the 
Most  High.  We  have  no  good  beyond  Him. 
We  agree  with  Isaac  Watts: 

"Love  so  amazing,  so  divine, 

Demands  my  soul,  my  life,  my  all." 

We  offer  Him  every  thing  we  have  to  offer 
God  —  trust,  worship,  consecration  —  and  if, 
as  Luther  insists,  "trust  and  faith  of  the  heart 
alone  make  both  God  and  idol,"  Jesus  is  for 
us  God,  or  we  are  idolaters. 

But  by  the  word  "God"  we  mean  not  only 
that  Being  who  evokes  our  supreme  reverence 


GOD  69 

as  the  best  we  can  imagine  and  draws  out  our 
affectionate  trust,  but  also  the  Lord  of  the  uni- 
verse and  of  history,  whose  are  sun  and  moon 
and  stars  of  light,  and  the  successive  gener- 
ations of  the  children  of  men.  Jesus  on  the 
cross  is  after  all  a  defeated  Man,  who  cherished 
a  fair  hope,  gave  Himself  to  its  achievement 
with  singular  fidelity,  cast  a  spell  over  a  dis- 
cerning few  by  the  loveliness  of  His  character 
and  the  idealism  of  His  teaching,  but  seemed 
entirely  out  of  harmony  with  the  world  in  His 
own  or  in  any  succeeding  age.  What  con- 
nection can  we  prove  between  this  dying 
Man,  whose  sublime  sense  of  obligation  and 
heroic  self-sacrifice  compel  our  honour  and 
fealty,  and  the  mysterious  Power  we  instinc- 
tively fancy  as  Creator  and  Controller  of  this 
and  all  worlds? 

There  are  spots  in  the  Highlands  of  Scot- 
land where  the  stranger  is  confused  by  the 
various  bodies  of  water,  all  of  which  are  called 
"  lochs. "  Some  are  fresh  water  lakes,  but  others 
of  the  same  general  shape  and  appearance, 
winding  in  and  out  about  the  feet  of  the  great 
hills  and  making  their  way  far  inland,  are 
long  arms  of  the  ocean.    Dip  in  your  finger 


70      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

and  taste  the  water  and  it  is  brine.  The  loch 
rises  and  falls  with  the  tides  of  the  sea,  and  is 
one  with  the  vast  Atlantic.  To  the  men  of 
the  New  Testament  the  devotion  of  Jesus  on 
Calvary  is  one  with  the  eternal  devotion  of 
God.  The  conscience  that  impels  Him  to  lay 
down  His  life  is  timed  by  the  conscience  of  Him 
that  sitteth  upon  the  throne  of  everlasting 
right.  The  love  that  spares  not  His  own  blood 
and  pours  out  His  soul  unto  death  is  the  dis- 
closure of  the  heart  of  Him,  of  whom  and 
through  and  unto  whom  are  all  things,  the 
Lord  of  heaven  and  earth.  Jesus,  and  Jesus 
supremely  in  His  death,  is  for  them  their 
definition  of  God.  "  God  is  love, "  and  "  Hereby 
know  we  love,  because  He  laid  down  His  life 
for  us.'* 

And  in  viewing  Jesus,  particularly  in  His 
death,  as  the  disclosure  of  God,  they  are  not 
making  an  arbitrary  selection  of  an  event 
which  has  most  impressed  them,  but  following 
Jesus'  own  selection  of  the  most  clearly  divine 
act  in  His  career.  He  usually  emphasized 
the  likeness  of  God  and  man,  in  order  to  make 
plain  God's  humanness;  but  the  cross  was  to 
Him  the  point  at  which  God  and  man  stood 


GOD  71 

farthest  apart.  It  was  when  Peter  indignantly 
protested  against  His  letting  Himself  be  cru- 
cified, that  Jesus  heard  in  him  man's  judg- 
ment clashing  with  God's  "thou  mindest  not 
the  things  of  God, but  the  things  of  men."  To 
spare  Himself  was  satanic,  to  sacrifice  Himself 
divine.  As  Jesus  looked  forward  to  Calvary, 
it  was  there  that  He  saw  Himself  most  mani- 
festly Godlike. 

It  has  been  commonly  assumed  that  the 
correct  way  to  ascertain  what  God  is  like 
is  to  study  the  facts  of  the  world  and  infer  the 
kind  of  Being  who  designed  and  directs  it. 
The  universe  is  vast,  its  God  must  be  omnip- 
otent; it  is  intricate  and  complicated,  so  He 
must  be  omniscient;  men  think  they  see  signs 
of  His  control  and  activity  in  every  part  of  it, 
therefore  He  must  be  omnipresent.  Order 
and  arrangement  are  everywhere,  and  they 
conclude  that  God  has  a  mind  like  ours,  only 
wiser.  They  find  a  conscience  and  ideals  in 
themselves,  and  reason  that  God  must  be  at 
least  as  good  as  the  best  of  men.  It  is  a  sys- 
tem of  guessing,  and  may  perhaps  come  near 
the  truth,  but  it  can  result  only  in  a  man-made 
notion  of  Deity.     The  Bible  writers  look  at 


72      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

the  problem  differently.  They  are  men  of 
vivid  religious  experience  to  whom  God  is  an 
indubitable  fact,  and  in  their  experience  with 
Him,  it  is  not  so  much  they  who  are  seeking  to 
reach  Him,  as  He  who  is  trying  to  get  at  them. 
And  when  from  Calvary  they  are  mastered 
by  a  love  which  constrains  them  to  answer 
with  their  all,  when  they  see  in  the  Crucified 
their  Ideal,  the  Better  than  their  Best,  they 
are  sure  that  God  is  laying  hold  of  them  and 
disclosing  Himself  to  them.  Jesus  is  for  them 
God's  own  description  of  Himself.  **It  was 
the  good  pleasure  of  the  Father  that  in  Him 
should  all  the  fulness  dwell."  "God  com- 
mendeth  His  own  love  toward  us  in  that,  while 
we  were  yet  sinners,  Christ  died  for  us."  In- 
stead of  starting  with  the  universe  and  guessing 
out  God  from  it,  the  Christian  feels  that  God 
comes  to  him  through  Jesus,  and  especially 
at  the  point  where  Jesus  makes  His  divinest 
impression  through  the  cross,  and  reveals 
Himself  to  us.  Ours  is  a  Jesus-like  God.  "  God 
was  in  Christ,  reconciling  the  world  unto  Him- 
self," and  through  Jesus's  reconciling  love  for 
us,  we  know  God. 

Let  us  stop  and  think  what  we  are  saying. 


GOD  73 

We  are  facing  Christ  crucified,  and  letting  a 
voice  tell  us,  "Be  still  and  know  that  I  am  God." 
Through  the  cross  we  are  peering  into  the  very 
centre  of  things  —  through  this  conscientious 
Brother,  who  owes  and  pays  His  kinsmen  a 
life,  to  a  conscientious  Father,  who  acknowl- 
edged Himself  indebted  to  His  children  and 
obliged  to  spare  no  thought  or  pains  for  them; 
through  this  Man  of  sorrows  to  a  God  who 
feels  the  shock  and  shame  of  His  children's  sin; 
through  the  writhing  body  and  burdened  spirit 
of  this  broken  Life  to  the  quivering  and  laden 
Heart  who  bears  the  world;  through  the  vic- 
torious love  of  the  Crucified  drawing  all  men 
unto  Himself  to  the  good- will  of  Him  who  is 
First  and  Last,  Author  and  Perfecter  of  all. 
We  live  in  a  world  where  God  has  entirely  hid- 
den Himself.  We  neither  see  nor  hear  Him. 
Benjamin  Jowett  said  of  Greek  literature, 
"Under  the  marble  exterior  was  concealed 
a  soul  thrilling  with  spiritual  emotion."  At 
Calvary  men  discover,  under  the  seeming  in- 
difference of  the  universe,  a  most  sensitive 
conscience  and  a  most  tender  devotion.  "  God 
is  love." 

But  is  it  credible  that  the  Crucified  is  the 


74      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

clearest  portrayal  of  the  final  Reality  back  of 
and  dominant  in  all  existence?  How  hard  it 
is  always  to  be  sure  of  it!  Think  of  the  world 
we  know  with  its  grandeurs  and  terrors  —  skies, 
seas,  mountains,  sunshine,  and  storm  —  birth, 
growth,  decay,  pain,  death  —  with  its  history, 
writ  large  on  our  race  or  small  on  every  man, 
a  strangely  chequered  tale  of  light  and  shade, 
infamy  and  glory.  Think  of  our  own  expe- 
riences when  we  have  breathed  the  words  "O 
God!"  —  moments  of  rapture  in  some  seventh 
heaven  of  happiness  and  moments  of  anguish 
in  some  nethermost  pit  of  shame  or  in  some 
tophet  of  torture;  moments  of  eager  desire 
when  our  whole  hearts  went  out  in  passionate 
craving  for  a  coveted  joy  and  moments  of 
abject  failure  when  our  sole  wish  was  to  be 
relieved  altogether  of  the  responsibility  of 
living;  moments  of  perplexity  when  we  longed 
for  some  clear  guidance  in  this  bewildering 
maze  of  circumstance;  and  moments  when  we 
looked  to  the  unresponsive  heavens  for  some 
sign  of  understanding  and  sympathy.  Can 
Calvary  be  the  correct  symbol  of  Him  who 
controls  this  world's  actual  life.^ 

Is  it  not,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  through  the 


GOD  t5 

cross  that  men  wanting  God  most  desperately 
have  most  certainly  been  satisfied?  A  recent 
novelist  pictures  her  heroine  in  a  supreme  ordeal 
and  tells  us:  "The  only  thought  that  seemed  to 
soothe  the  torture  of  her  imagination  was 
the  thought  stamped  on  her  brain  tissue  by  the 
long  inheritance  of  centuries  —  the  thought 
of  Christ  on  Calvary.  .  .  .  She  did  not 
pray  in  words,  but  her  agony  crept  to  the  foot 
of  what  has  become,  through  the  action  and 
interaction  of  two  thousand  years,  the  typical 
and  representative  agony  of  the  world,  and, 
clinging  there,  made  wild  appeal,  like  the  gener- 
ations before  her,  to  a  God  in  whose  hand  lie 
the  creatures  of  His  will."  It  is  not  an  acci- 
dent which  has  drawn  the  years  to  act  and  in- 
teract upon  the  recollection  of  the  cross.  What 
men  sought  a  God  for  they  have  found  through 
it.  Comfort,  sympathy,  inspiration,  a  sense 
of  oneness  with  their  Ideal,  forgiveness,  con- 
secration, guidance,  indomitable  hope  —  these 
and  much  more  Calvary  has  actually  given 
them.  What  they  mean  by  the  word  "God" 
—  redeeming,  transforming,  glorifying  love  — 
lays  hold  of,  masters,  moulds,  vitalizes  them 
through    the    Crucified.     They    cannot    bear 


76      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

truthful  witness  to  their  own  experience  save 
as  they  declare,  *'God  commendeth  His  own 
love  toward  us  in  that,  while  we  were  yet 
sinners,  Christ  died  for  us." 

But  some  may  object  to  this  definition  of 
God  by  the  cross.  They  grant  that  Calvary 
reveals  one  element  in  His  character  —  love  — 
but  they  insist  that  God  must  have  other 
qualities  than  love  to  be  really  the  God  we 
want.  Unlike  that  odd  French  ecclesiastic. 
Cardinal  de  Retz,  who  declared  that  "it  re- 
quires much  greater  qualities  to  become  the 
successful  head  of  a  party  than  to  rule  the  uni- 
verse, "  they  feel  that  the  problem  of  being  God 
is  so  serious  that  mere  character,  however  good, 
will  not  suffice.  God  must  possess  wisdom  and 
power  as  well.  But  are  these  supplementary 
to  love,  or  is  love  itself  both  wise  and  strong? 

To  many  people  there  seems  no  necessary  con- 
nection between  love  and  wisdom.  Generosity 
often  appears  divorced  from  judgment,  and 
affection  from  cleverness.  The  devoted  are  not 
invariably  the  far-sighted.  A  God  who  is  merely 
love  may  be  fooled  and  frustrated:  but  this 
is  not  the  conviction  of  the  New  Testament. 
Christ  crucified  is  the  wisdom  of  God.     The 


GOD  77 

Palm  Sunday  venture  of  Jesus  trusting  Himself 
to  a  hostile  city  was  an  act  of  bravery,  but  it 
seemed  foolhardy.  Mary's  impulsive  breaking 
of  her  flask  of  precious  ointment,  which  Jesus 
so  prized  as  the  expression  of  a  spirit  akin  to 
His  own,  was  touching,  but  apparently  wasteful 
and  useless.  But  time,  which  is  the  test  of 
wisdom,  has  demonstrated  that  Jesus'  dying 
was  supremely  wise;  and  Mary's  ointment  is 
still  filling  an  ever  larger  world  with  its  fra- 
grance. Jesus'  dying  was  as  sane  and  sensi- 
ble as  all  His  living.  To  Him  love  was  wisdom, 
and  to  choose  the  most  loving  course  was  in- 
evitably to  select  the  wisest. 

And  at  this  point  most  of  His  followers  fail 
to  share  their  Master's  faith.  When  we  dis- 
cuss questions  of  poHcy  —  the  decisions  a 
business  firm  must  make,  the  course  a  nation's 
statesmanship  should  adopt,  the  practical 
methods  a  church  can  most  successfully  em- 
ploy —  it  does  not  occur  to  us  to  ask,  "  Which  is 
the  most  Calvary-like  of  our  alternatives?" 
and  choose  that,  sure  that  we  cannot  be  mis- 
taken. In  the  complicated  personal  problems 
that  confront  us  —  family  questions,  our  deal- 
ings  with   particularly    difficult   persons,   our 


78      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

relations  with  the  disagreeable,  the  aggressive, 
the  ne'er-do-weel,  the  degenerate,  our  de- 
cisions as  to  obligation  —  how  infrequently  we 
take  them  to  the  cross,  and,  seeking  to  settle 
them  in  accord  with  its  spirit,  feel  confident 
that  we  are  certainly  correct !  We  do  not  really 
believe  that  Christ  crucified  is  the  wisdom  of 
God,  and  that  to  be  of  His  mind  is  to  share  the 
only  omniscience  within  our  reach,  the  only 
omniscience  in  existence  if  through  that  cross 
we  see  God's  self-disclosure. 

A  few  years  ago  a  French  engineer,  M.  Dibos, 
happened  to  be  on  board  a  Channel  steamer 
which  ran  into  a  dense  bank  of  fog.  He 
noticed  that  about  the  mouth  of  one  of  the 
stoke-hold  ventilators  there  was  a  considerable 
clear  space.  He  immediately  conceived  the 
idea  that  the  mechanical  shock  of  the  heated 
air  destroyed  the  equilibrium  of  the  particles 
of  water  and  made  them  fall.  He  has,  after 
a  good  many  experiments,  devised  a  simple 
apparatus  which  under  test  produces  in  a  dense 
fog  a  clear  space  over  two  hundred  yards  long. 
As  the  shock  of  heat  precipitates  the  obscuring 
fog,  the  warmth  of  consecration,  the  heat  of 
a  redemptive  passion,  dissipates  the  mists  of 


GOD  79 

life  which  hinder  us  from  seeing.  A  love  like 
Jesus  Christ's  cuts  a  long  stretch  of  clear  out- 
look ahead  and  lets  Him  see.  His  fog-bound 
brethren  may  speak  of  His  imprudence,  His 
poor  judgment,  His  unpracticalness.  His  folly; 
but  that  devotion  by  which  He  is  guided  is 
for  Him  the  wisdom  of  God. 

And,  again,  there  seems  to  many  to  be  no 
connection  between  love  and  force.  To  do 
the  kindest  thing  is  not  necessarily  to  do  the 
most  effective.  Affection  often  impresses  us 
as  impotent.  Legislators  planning  the  national 
defence  do  not  consider  good-will  our  most 
impregnable  fortification.  Workmen  strug- 
gling for  a  juster  distribution  of  the  results  of 
industry  are  unlikely  to  regard  brotherliness 
as  their  strongest  argument.  Prisons  and  re- 
formatories are  not  consciously  moulded  by 
Calvary  as  though  the  reembodiment  of  its 
principles  in  the  institutions  and  men  who  must 
handle  the  hardest  human  beings  gives  the 
most  satisfactory  results.  Even  preachers  and 
teachers  hesitate  to  use  the  cross  of  Christ 
as  their  strongest  appeal;  less  unselfish  motives 
they  think  more  readily  accessible  in  their 
congregations  and  pupils.     The  cross  has  never 


80      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

been  widely  accepted  by  Christians  as  suffi- 
ciently practical  to  be  used.  Its  patient  endur- 
ance of  wrong,  its  lamb-like  self-surrender,  its 
sacrifice  of  rights,  ambitions,  happiness  —  of 
every  thing  except  principle  —  its  utterly  dis- 
interested love,  have  seemed  ineffective  in  a 
world  like  ours.  It  is  not  to  many  the  power 
of  God. 

Mr.  Kipling  in  his  last  volume  pictures  a 
baron  overhearing  snatches  of  the  song: 

"  'Gold  is  for  the  mistress,  silver  for  the  maid  I 
Copper  for  the  craftsman  cunning  at  his  trade! ' 
'Good!'  said  the  Baron,  sitting  in  his  hall, 
*But  Iron  —  Cold  Iron  —  is  master  of  them  all!'  '* 

And  relying  on  his  strength,  he  wages  an  un- 
successful rebellion  against  his  King,  and  finds 
himself  behind  cold  iron  bars. 

*'Yet  his  King  spake  kindly    (Ah,  how  kind  a  Lord!) 
*What  if  I  release  thee  now  and  give  thee  back  thy  sword?' 
*Nay !'  said  the  Baron,  'mock  not  at  my  fall. 
For  Iron  —  Cold  Iron  —  is  master  of  men  all ! ' 

"Yet  his  King  made  answer  (few  such  Kings  there  be!) 
*Here  is  Bread  and  here  is  Wine  —  sit  and  sup  with  me.' 
He  took  the  Wine  and  blessed  it;  He  blessed  and  brake 

the  Bread. 
With  His  own  hands  He  served  them,  and  presently  He 

said: 
'Look!     These  Hands   they   pierced   with  nails  outside 

My  city  wall 
Show  Iron  —  Cold  Iron  —  to  be  master  of  men  all !'  " 


GOD  81 

**  'Wounds  are  for  the  desperate,  blows  are  for  the  strong, 
Balm  and  oil  for  weary  hearts  all  cut  and  bruised  with 

wrong. 
I  forgive  thy  treason  —  I  redeem  thy  fall  — 
For  Iron  —  Cold  Iron  —  must  be  master  of  men  all.'" 

The  old  song  rang  on  in  the  Baron's  ears: 

"  ^Crowns  are  for  the  valiant  —  sceptres  for  the  bold! 
Thrones  and  powers  for  mighty  men  who  dare  to  take  and 

hold.' 
*Nay !'  said  the  Baron,  kneeling  in  his  hall. 
But  Iron  —  Cold  Iron  —  is  master  of  men  all ! ' " 

Jesus  consciously  plans  a  royal  entry  into 
Jerusalem  when  He  knows  that  He  rides  to 
His  death.  It  is  His  way  of  proclaiming  His 
faith  that  through  self-sacrifice  He  will  reign, 
through  service  be  Lord  of  all.  And  the  cen- 
turies since  testify  that  the  mightiest  force 
of  which  they  know  comes  from  the  summit  of 
that  hill  where  a  defeated  Man  is  done  to  an 
ignominious  death. 

We  speak  of  the  omnipotence  of  God;  and, 
starting  with  the  assumption  that  He  can  do 
every  thing,  are  puzzled  by  that  which  He  does 
not  do,  and  at  that  which  He  allows.  To  be 
genuinely  Christian  we  must  not  speak  of  the 
omnipotence  but  of  the  "amorpotence,"  the 
love  power,  of  God.   He  does  every  thing  that 


82      SOCIAL  ASPECTS  OF  THE  CROSS 

love  can,  and  allows  nothing  that  love  is  able 
to  prevent.  Love  has  limitations,  and  so  has 
God.  "And  when  He  drew  nigh,  He  saw  the 
city  and  wept  over  it  .  .  .  How  often 
would  I  .  .  .  and  ye  would  not."  Were 
not  love  powerless  in  the  face  of  some  cir- 
cumstances, the  tragedy  of  Golgotha  would 
not  have  been  enacted.  "He  was  crucified 
through  weakness.'*  There  is  a  weakness  in 
God.  He  is  at  His  children's  mercy:  and  in 
that  are  involved  all  life's  tragedies  —  the 
Judases  God  cannot  keep  from  treachery,  the 
Christs  from  whom  it  is  not  possible  that  the 
cup  can  pass.  The  spitting  and  scourging,  the 
crown  of  thorns,  the  nails  and  spear,  are  vivid 
symbols  of  present  methods  of  treating  the 
Love  that  loves  us.  God  cannot  prevent  us; 
He  can  only  bear  us.  But  "crucified  through 
weakness"  the  patience  that  bears  has  a 
strength  all  its  own.  We  look  on  Him  whom 
we  have  pierced,  and  are  mastered.  '*The 
weakness  of  God  is  stronger  than  men." 

"What  means  it  to  have  a  God?"  to  repeat 
Luther's  searching  question.  "To  have  a  God 
is  nothing  else  than  to  trust  and  believe  in 
Him  with  all  our  hearts."     Is  the  God  who 


GOD  83 

defines  Himself  for  us  through  Christ  crucified 
the  Being  we  adore,  depend  on,  serve  with 
our  all,  and  confidently  expect  to  see  Lord  of 
heaven  and  earth?  Is  His  self -giving  love 
that  which  we  invariably  employ  as  the  wisest 
guide  and  the  strongest  force  in  the  universe? 
In  a  genuine  sense  God  is  not  yet  manifestly 
God.  His  godship  He  has  still  to  gain.  His 
glory,  which  is  His  character,  will  not  be  re- 
vealed until  all  flesh  see  it  together,  and  that 
cannot  come  to  pass  until  Love  is  all  in  all. 
But  is  He  God  to  us?  Is  the  love  commended 
by  Calvary  our  wisdom  and  our  power? 


THE    END 


Date  Due 


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FAdUMA 


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